NT Doctrine — Galatians 2

Posted on January 20, 2024 by ehurst

Paul continues the narrative of his dealings with the original Hebrew Apostles and the community they led in Jerusalem. After some 14 years of working without them in Syrian Antioch, the Lord commanded him to return visit Jerusalem again. We can be sure the Lord foresaw the conflict about to arise, and wanted Paul to be certain in his own mind that it was bogus. He took with him Barnabas (the Cyprian Jew who came to Christ) and Titus (a Gentile convert).

Paul conferred in a private meeting with the church leadership. They were all satisfied that what Paul had been teaching all along was consistent with how they remembered the message of Jesus. While there, no one pressured Titus to hide his Gentile background. They recognized Titus as a fellow follower of Christ just as he was.

Paul comes back to the current dispute behind this letter. Near as we can tell, the Judaizers who came up from Jerusalem to Syrian Antioch were mostly genuine Christian converts. Their emphasis was that Jesus was the Messiah of Israel. The bunch who spread out across Galatia were dominated by fake converts seeking to restore not just Moses, but the Talmud. They had piggybacked with the real converts who were already causing enough trouble. Paul describes this latter group as seeking to enslave both Hebrew and Gentile coverts under Jewish civil law, not Moses. This was a form of espionage, a purely political operation that aimed to expand the Jewish tax base, among other things.

In other words, Paul claims these agents knew they were lying about what Jesus had taught. And as soon as Paul spotted them, he made a very public denunciation that the rest of the community in Antioch supported. Keep in mind that Jesus treated the Talmud as valid Jewish civil law, but not a valid expression of Moses. Paul noted the same distinction in how he dealt with Jewish persecution.

Backing up again to that private meeting in Jerusalem, Paul noted that it didn’t matter who was who. This was all about the gospel message, not persons claiming leadership. As it was, they could not add anything because Paul had left out nothing essential. They recognized Paul as having been with Jesus on different terms. They clearly understood that Paul had been commissioned by the Lord to take the gospel to Gentiles, equal to Peter’s commission to the Hebrews. Paul notes that this conference included James (Jesus’ brother), as well as Peter and John (Jesus’ cousins). When they mentioned how important it was to engage in charity among the poor, that was nothing new to Paul.

Thus, Paul was their equal in their own eyes. And he did not hesitate to call them out when they were wrong. Later on, when Peter came to visit a while in Syrian Antioch, the Hebrew Apostle that had been first to visit in a Gentile home and share the gospel some years before, he naturally ate with Gentiles, too. Such mixing was forbidden by the Talmud, but that was a misreading of Moses. Still, it was ingrained in Jews as a mental reflex. When a delegation from James came up to get a feel for the ministry there in Antioch, Peter seemed to be taken with a false guilt about mixing with Gentiles, and began to withdraw socially, and pressured others, to the point even Barnabas was sucked into it.

I’m willing to bet Paul used humor with Peter in pointing out the hypocrisy. Here was Peter, who for some years had obeyed the Covenant of Christ and neglected the Talmud, to the point he almost lived like a Gentile himself, and he’s going to be aloof from Gentiles because they didn’t adhere to Jewish civil law?

For the Galatian churches, Paul recounted his reasoning on the matter. Jews were born under the Covenant of Moses. Even the rabbinical traditions recognized that merely fulfilling the external obligations of Moses did not bring peace with God. They recited daily about the necessity of personal feudal submission to God. Thus, Jews should be the first to recognize that the sacrifice of their Messiah was necessary to wash away their sins; He was the only one who had standing to claim a pure life. So, having once claimed Him as their Messiah and King, how can they renege on their allegiance to His Law by go back to the Law that died on the Cross with Him?

The national identity of Israel as God’s people ended at the Cross. That identity was translated into a spiritual kingdom, whose King is Jesus. To follow Jesus meant renouncing that old national identity. How could Paul go back to building up the failed nation of Israel, as if to take it all back from the Messiah’s hands? It is tantamount to rejecting the Father’s policy in His Son of reaching the whole world without dragging Gentiles under the Law of Moses.

As a Jew, Paul followed Christ through the completion of the Law. There was nothing left for the Covenant of Moses to accomplish. Jesus paid the ultimate price to finish it. His new identity was in the Messiah, so that means following Him to the Cross, and burying his old Jewish identity. But he was also resurrected with Christ to a new identity. Now he lives by personal commitment to Jesus as Lord, allowing Him to use his body and manifest Himself anew. Christians are His body now; He shows Himself in their lives, having bought them by His own blood.

The key is ditching one’s human identity, whether Jew or Gentile. The Kingdom of Heaven is a wholly different kind of identity that transcends all of that. Paul’s Jewish birthright did not include divine grace; it simply opened the door for it. Having gone through that door into God’s grace, it would be sheer folly to back out now. It would mean Christ died for nothing. Trying to reassert the Jewish identity was backing out of God’s grace available only in His Son.

The Judaizers among the Galatian churches were trying to drag everyone back into a Jewish national identity, out of divine grace.

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Germ or Terrain?

Posted on January 16, 2024 by ehurst

I’ve been called a lot of things, and “crackpot” has recurred often enough that I have begun to celebrate it. So, today I offer another of my crackpot teachings. This is one of those things where, you don’t have to agree with me, but as a member of Kiln of the Soul, you have to tolerate me teaching it.

There is one primary reason I generally reject most vaccines: I don’t believe that viruses are a medical issue. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but that they aren’t a valid explanation for human maladies. Most vaccines are meant to counter viral infections, and it is the specific concept of “viral infection” that I teach doesn’t exist.

This is whence your Kiln of the Soul religious exemption from mandated vaccines come.

Now, let’s make another clarification: I’m not saying bacterial infections don’t exist. Some bacteria can kill you. A bacterial infection may require treatment; I’ve had a few. However, the whole class of so-called “viral epidemics” are a big lie.

Here’s one example: The Spanish Flu pandemic was not a flu virus. Whatever it was, it was not spread by viral infection. It was tested. During that “pandemic”, randomly chosen healthy people were exposed to all the possible vectors of viral infection, and never got sick. They were sent into hospital wards, spoke with and touched sick people. Neither via mouth, nose, eyes or even a blood injection would the exposure to fluids from sick people make these random test subjects sick.

I’ll let you look it up for yourself because I don’t want to spoil it by cherry-picking sources for you. A rejection of the viral theory is associated with the “terrain theory” versus “germ theory”, but I’m not fully onboard with terrain theory. I believe that debate is a false dichotomy. If you use a search engine, you’ll get a tidal wave of references that disparage any dissent from the mainstream germ theory, so be forewarned. However, I do not reject germ theory altogether. I say that it suffers limits; it cannot explain everything it attempts to address.

Most medical people live by the germ theory and vehemently reject terrain theory. That’s because the medical education system is a monolith, and there is darned little actual research by the teachers and students. People get certifications and licenses without ever field testing much of their education. They know what the system requires of them, and seldom ever see the research itself, only very biased reports of it. It hasn’t actually been genuine science for a very long time.

The terrain theory covers a wide range of ideas, but the core idea is that most common health issues would fade away if people simply observed a natural approach to life, and took care to mitigate inherited conditions. The sum total of medical knowledge just scratches the surface, and the medical industry should stop pretending to have the only answers.

Granted, it’s well nigh impossible to obtain, much less afford, a good natural diet as God intended for us. Whether it be the whiny demands of consumers at large or the shaping of consumer demand by marketers, you decide, but what I can find in my average local grocery store is mostly toxic in one way or another.

I will offer this link which is mostly balanced, but not in the sense that I endorse the specific answers offered there. I would rather you consider the approach itself. The author suggests there’s no reason to take sides, just find a functional path that works for you.

Virtually everything you need to obey the Lord is already provided naturally. Give it some attention.

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Septuagint and NT

Posted on January 15, 2024 by ehurst

I don’t recall it being mentioned in the book, but in the documentary film about Heiser’s Demons, he mentions something that is not obvious to a lot of people.

In the New Testament, we see the terminology of spirit beings restricted to “angels” and “demons”. There is little direct mention of how many different classes of creatures are covered under those labels. There’s a good reason for that: the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament) was the Bible everyone in the New Testament used. It was an editorial policy of the Septuagint translators to narrow down all the references in Hebrew to spirit beings to those two Greek words. And when it simply could not be done that way, they defaulted to the term usually translated as “gods” in English.

For those who spoke Greek across the Mediterranean Basin, the words for “angel” and “demon” were not restricted to the meanings common in English. So, when Paul wrote those words in his Greek epistles, it is wholly implausible to think he was restricted that way in his own thinking. He would have been familiar with the Second Temple teaching on the Elohim Council in God’s divine courts. Thus, in his letters, Paul often used terms like principalities, powers, etc. He knew that, in Hebrew scholarship, the term “elohim” was, in literal terms, a reference to any eternal being that did not normally have a corporeal form (not to mention it was used symbolically to designate an awful lot of human authorities).

Jesus would have also be aware of that. He never bothered to correct this impression, so it wasn’t an issue worth mentioning in His teaching. We can only guess at His choice of words in His native Hebrew Aramaic tongue, since the Gospels were uniformly published in Greek, so far as we have any evidence. There may be some speculation about Matthew and maybe some unnamed record in Aramaic, but we have nothing to show for it.

There’s been some polemics against Heiser’s writing from Reformed writers in particular. However, these writers cannot be taken seriously. It requires only a small amount of checking to verify Heiser’s sources on, at a minimum, his thesis that the Hebrew scholarship believed in the Elohim Council, and that neither Jesus, nor anyone else in the New Testament, objects to that belief. We are aware that there are plenty of moral issues neither Jesus nor the Apostles addressed simply because they never arose during their ministries. Jesus went out of His way to point out the errors of Second Temple scholarship when it mattered. There’s no point in defending the classical European church theology on this issue, since it is easily traced to serious errors in scholarship.

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Top of the List

Posted on January 14, 2024 by ehurst

Once we get past the Radix Fidem approach to religion, it’s just a matter of answering questions. In the process of answering questions, we open the door to someone’s heart so they can hear the things they need to hear. The rest of the onion layers can be shuffled around in order; we have to reach people where they are.

Now, the market for religious teaching is saturated. We are not going to reach anyone who isn’t already searching for better answers. And among those who are searching, we cannot appeal to those who aren’t ready to hear our kind of answers. There will always be people genuinely searching but looking in a different direction. We cannot help them until/unless the Lord leads them our way.

We know that a critical element in Jesus’ ministry was the miracles. But we really need to understand that His miracles were a restoration of the Covenant of Moses. Every malady and demon His people suffered was because of the failure of the Judea’s leadership. As the Messiah, He was restoring the covenant promises to the people.

We do not have a covenant nation. There are no missing miracles that we can pin down by God’s promises. Whatever we do with miracles, it cannot be the same thing Jesus did. We are not in the same context; the manifestation of authority must come in a different way. It’s not as if we cannot have any miracles at all, but that the character and net result of those miracles will be different.

Miracles belong to the Covenant, but are not limited to the Covenant. While God can and does choose to grant miracles outside of any covenant, it will appear to us wholly random because the divine policy on that issue is beyond human ken. There is no principle stated in Scripture that covers that issue. Rather, we have the issue of struggling to reach full covenant compliance. There’s a lot of ground to recover there, and until the Lord shows us more of what we have lost over the past two millennia, we cannot have a strong assurance of the ground of miracles.

Don’t point to the apostolic miracles that proliferated after the gospel escaped the borders of Judah. Those were under a level of covenant compliance that we haven’t yet approached. Again, those took place in a different context than ours. I am not suggesting that miracles have ceased. By no means; I’ve been granted too many in my life to suggest that. What I’m saying is that we do not have grounds for a consistent expectation of miracles. We are not in the position to declare that they simply must come when we engage this or that set of practices and teaching.

And God forbid we should drop off into the swamp of telling people their miracles have failed because they don’t believe strongly enough. That’s not how it works. Blaming the victim is not a biblical principle.

All we really have is a minimum standard that will give us a better chance to exercise the kind of faith that manifests spiritual gifts and other miracles. We should have our own covenant context, something that matches our situation.

We’ve already said this before: A major element in seeing miracles is having your soul prepared to hear the voice of God. Insofar as it’s possible, we must replicate in our own souls the minimum standard equipment that makes us able to see what God is willing to do for His people at any time and place. It’s not as if we could perfectly match the ancient Hebrew frame of mind and faith, but we can certainly approximate that in our own context.

Here’s the problem: Our western society is so very far away from even that approximation. It’s not just a geographical move, nor an intellectual one, but we have to crawl across several millennia of human experience, too. In order to pursue the Spirit, we must be able to see Him. We must become sensitive to where and how He has walked in this world. It’s not something the head can learn; it must be in the heart. It requires a gift from the Holy Spirit just to know the Holy Spirit.

There are plenty of human maladies the Lord will not heal under any circumstances. Did you ever consider the simple matter of human aging? The flesh is mortal, and the only healing for mortality is to die. Dying in this human existence is the ultimate miracle.

To avoid the mass of sorrows afflicting the Jewish people in Jesus’ day, we would need several generations of covenant faithfulness. How many people today do you know that were born under a valid manifestation of the Covenant of Christ? Our social and political institutions have not been specifically Christian since before the rise of Constantine. We are all coming into the Covenant of Christ as individuals starting from scratch with no useful legacy at all. We have zero background in understanding the nature of these things.

People who stand outside the Covenant are always in the line of fire, but people within the Covenant are working toward the reward of death. With the Jews of Jesus’ day, the unfaithfulness of the leadership (the Two Witnesses) placed the people in the line of fire. Jesus healed, delivered and raised the dead to restore what people lost from their established Covenant promises. Most of us have no missing covenant to recover. We are coming from outside the covenant system.

We must reclaim the covenant that we have been offered, coming in from scratch. It’s a different covenant altogether. The key to our miracles is conviction and context, and the certainty that it will appear random. We approach the Throne of Supplication with a totally different expectation. There is nothing automatic about it. We can heal, deliver and raise the dead only if the Lord desires to in each particular case, and when He wants. Don’t presume on His whims; it’s not a matter of human need, but of glory’s necessities.

Thus, the issue of having standing to request a miracle becomes paramount. That’s what we must work on. The greatest miracle prior to death is the realization that we are His. The next greatest miracle to that is being moved to enter into the full Covenant of Christ. These are the miracles we should put at the top of our list of things we seek from the Father.

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NT Doctrine — Galatians 1

Posted on January 13, 2024 by ehurst

The label “Galatia” refers to the first few churches Paul established in what we now call Central Turkey: Derbe, Lystra, Iconium and Pisidian Antioch, and any satellite churches those congregations may have established later. This is Paul’s earliest letter, likely written in around AD 48 shortly before that first council in Jerusalem (Acts 15, variously dated between 48-50). What we find in this epistle is very much like what he said at that meeting.

The problem was Judaizers. While the meaning of that term morphed a good bit over the following years, at this early stage in things, it was used to indicate a faction of converted Pharisees. They clearly understood that Jesus taught Moses. They probably understood His rejection of the Talmud. They also understood the necessity of faith that Israel had abandoned long ago, and were intent on restoring the true Old Testament religion. But they got hung up on the part about Jesus being the Messiah of Israel. They insisted that, to follow Christ, Gentiles had to come under the Covenant of Moses. They did not understand that the Law of Moses died on the Cross, and that Jesus had proclaimed a New Covenant that eclipsed it.

For them, it was not a question of continuity between the Old and New Covenants, but that they insisted the New was a continuation of the Old. This was a doctrine based on the residual racism of the Talmudic teaching, a spite for Gentiles. Gentiles could not go to Heaven as Gentiles. But this was false even under Moses. Under Moses, Israel was supposed to accept Gentiles who observed the Noahic Law, something Israel had long forgotten. So, the outcome of the Acts 15 council was that Gentile Christians could defer to Noah.

Paul and his companions had returned to Antioch in Syria after that first missionary journey. During his time there, teachers came up from Jerusalem demanding that the Gentile believers fully convert to Judaism. The controversy spread like wildfire. Paul wrote this stern warning to those churches: Don’t be suckered into this nonsense. After a brief introduction, Paul plunges right into it.

The gospel message of Christ that Paul first brought to those churches had not changed. This message took priority over any fresh word, even from angels. Anyone who came along insisting on some new requirements to following Christ was accursed. The Law of Moses didn’t do Israel much good; it was the faith behind the Law that mattered.

Paul was not trying to make peace with the Jews who crucified Jesus, and would some day try to kill him, too. Having gotten a PhD in Judaism and risen quite young to leadership serving the Sanhedrin, Paul knew more about it than the Judaizers roaming around. After God drove him through a conversion experience like no other, it wasn’t simply apostolic teaching that he parroted. He had spent time with the risen Christ to catch up with the Twelve. It turned out to be the same message they first proclaimed after Pentecost. Except, Paul knew from the start that he was called to minister to the Gentiles.

He eventually compared notes with Peter in private and confirmed it was the same message. Aside from a brief visit with Jesus’ brother James, Paul didn’t hang out with any of the other apostles. The only thing the Jerusalem church knew about him was that their former chief persecutor was now onboard with the gospel, and they were thrilled to hear that. At no time did Paul attempt to curry their favor or support. He had a mission and calling direct from God. The message he first brought to Galatia was what he learned from Christ Himself.

These Judaizing goons claiming to come from the church in Jerusalem were not official representatives, but zealots doing their own thing. The Galatian churches should run them off.

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Exigencies of Infowar

Posted on January 13, 2024 by ehurst

I’m going to interrupt the Kiln of the Soul series today. Later I’ll post the weekly Bible lesson, but this post is a short list of related things I ask you to consider.

1. What passes for AI is not really Artificial Intelligence. It’s just a very fancy text filter, and isn’t even good at math. It has no comprehension of numbers when it sees them, and can be expected to lie about anything statistical, in the sense that it simply cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imaginary. It knows only what it is told, and the bulk of what is out there on the Net is nonsense. The most AI can do correctly is approximate the writing style of certain individuals, or the net average of what passes for educated writing. It does not “know” anything; it has no concept of seeking to verify.

Thus, current AI could possibly echo my writing style and recognize it should someone else plagiarize my work. But it cannot factor conviction. If something was written mimicking my style, but with a different content, AI would not likely recognize the difference. My readers would pick up on it right away, but AI cannot even comprehend the notion of convictions. It can only recognize the terminology and how it is used grammatically.

I confess there are times I’m not sure what I would say about certain current events. Aside from broad themes of the otherworldly outlook and faith in the divine, AI could not predict where I would come down on some issues, yet I’m sure my readers could make a good guess. It’s because we are connected to each other via the Spirit Realm, and the moral realm of the heart. AI cannot connect to that.

2. The biggest issues we face in this time of tribulation are not the political instability, economic collapse, or even natural disasters. Our biggest problem is the blocking of the gospel. The gospel message is the only reason we live. Failing the outright censorship, our Enemy would gladly settle for dilution and perversion of the gospel, and finally the distraction from the gospel. This is the nature of information warfare. This is why I keep pointing to the problem of infowar. We are at war, but the real threat is derailing the gospel message, not loss of life and/or property. We are not silenced by politics, economic losses nor any other form of social instability. We are threatened by the silencing or perverting of our message.

In terms of things like computer security or information security, censorship is one thing while diluting or twisting the message is another. If I find myself fighting censorship, that’s a matter of access to the medium for both you and me. Fighting perversion of the message would most likely be someone picking over the message to counter it (government sock-puppets pretending to offer comments, for example). Worst of all, it would be someone pretending to be me and promoting a false message.

I’ve faced everything but that last one. I’d rather someone outright steal my work and claim it as their own, than to have my name attached to something false. The lackeys of Satan aren’t that smart, most of the time. If they decided that polluting our message was the way to go, they would try to use AI and not recognize why it failed.

3. Not every weirdo that has attacked the message on my blogs was sent by a human government. The Devil has lackeys everywhere. For me, the primary difference between a government agent and some individual flake is that the former will use certain IP addresses. The secondary clue is the range of things they will talk about. Government sock-puppets seldom grasp the whole issue of faith; they typically try to provoke some kind of political activism.

I can sensor the sock-puppets through comment moderation. The individuals who attack for other reasons might warrant an answer of some kind.

To the degree I might offer any kind of political, economic or social analysis, the government pays attention. Had the feds done a better job of forcing the states to toe the line on COVID, any comment I made about resisting the vaxx would have gotten me shut down. The whole COVID narrative has collapsed. While there are forces in the US and Europe who would love to use another pandemic against us, that previous failure has raised the price too high, I believe. So the pandemic advocates are kept around as a distraction, while the real threat is cooking up somewhere else.

4. Even that other threat is mostly a distraction from the gospel mission. I agree that Americans at large are under a serious threat of oppression, but that’s not news. The Scripture alone has provided enough clues for us to naturally expect America to be in deep trouble for her unique American sins. And our hearts loudly tell us that this is a time of God’s wrath. The real issue is the gospel message portrayed against the background of God’s wrath. The message of Christ is a lot louder and clearer when tribulation plays out behind it.

Our primary investment of care, attention and resources should be on the gospel message. What does it require to keep that message rolling forward?

My flesh loves playing with computer technology, but my heart knows to let it all go when it is no longer useful for promoting the gospel message. Right now, that’s my best tool for the message. The day will come when that ends. That’s part of why I believe now is the time to begin building communities of faith in meat-space. I’m actually hoping to wean my readers off of my writing, because, sometime in the near future, you won’t be able to get it. You need to absorb the message behind my writing, and become a source on your own.

This is information warfare.

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Kiln of the Soul: Radix Fidem

Posted on January 12, 2024 by ehurst

Again, it’s a process of giving folks a fair chance to bail out. If they aren’t ready for the radical difference in our approach, it’s a mercy to let them see enough to make an informed decision. This is the point at which we tell folks about the Radix Fidem approach to religion.

Radix Fidem pamphlet

Radix Fidem booklet

Radix Fidem Curriculum

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Dr. Heiser’s Video

Posted on January 11, 2024 by ehurst

Yesterday, I pressed the issue of seeking the Hebraic viewpoint of Scripture. This seems like as good a time as any to highly recommend readers watch this documentary. It’s a very brief summary of Dr. Michael S. Heiser’s Unseen Realm.

It presents only a bare outline of what’s in the book. However, it includes enough to cover the basics. I was especially pleased the teaching that baptism was not just a cleansing ritual, but became a symbol of allegiance and loyalty to Christ as Lord.

This would be a great item for introducing folks who aren’t familiar with the whole idea of Hebrew thinking. I managed to get a copy and convert it to MP4 so it can be shown on a wide range of devices.

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Kiln of the Soul: No Secrets

Posted on January 10, 2024 by ehurst

We will not hide anything. You can ask any question you like and get an honest answer. The whole body of teaching for Kiln of the Soul is easily obtained. But it’s a huge pile of reading, and not everyone is inclined to go through that before deciding whether to get involved.

So, to save them time and energy, we present to most outsiders something like an onion. Instead of layers of secrecy, we hope to offer layers of decision. The first decision point, as already stated, is the matter of faith’s fire. If that doesn’t run you off, then you may be interested in the next layer.

The next decision point is the declaration that Jesus was a Hebrew man, teaching a Hebrew religion, recorded in a Hebrew book (in terms of orientation, if not language). Most church folks have this instinctive notion that the New Testament is a western document. That’s plain wrong. The gospels may have varying emphases, but they all proclaim a Hebrew Messiah. Acts, the Letters and Revelation are all promoting a translated Hebrew covenant offered to mankind by the Hebrew God.

As we move forward with plans to organize local congregations under the label “Kiln of the Soul”, I think we will be surprised who can embrace that and who will choke on it. But we owe it to God as our duty to actively put up barriers that will exclude those who don’t belong.

Now, of course, saying “Hebrew” implies the broader academic term “Ancient Near East”. We must ensure that’s a part of the explanation of what Kiln of the Soul is about. Still, not everyone recognizes that term, so we start with talking about the Hebraic nature of following Christ. Further, we must be ready to mention that Hebrew is not the same as Jewish. As part of this layer of understanding, we must explain that Judaism is a departure from Old Testament religion. That was a fundamental part of Jesus’ message to His own nation. The meaning of “gospel” is the restoration of the faith inherent in the Old Covenant.

This filter is critical to gaining entrance to Kiln of the Soul.

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Kiln of the Soul: Leadership

Posted on January 9, 2024 by ehurst

Instead of a rational framework, I want to present our vision in terms of boundaries. Some of it is in layers. There’s no way I can cover everything that might arise as we move forward in this vision, but there are some things that I know already from experience.

The first layer must be the fire of faith. Anyone who manifests that so we can see it will be qualified to lead in some way. This is the core of the covenant family. These are the people who have learned not to get in the Lord’s way working in their lives. They’ll do whatever it takes to please Him.

The next layer is not what you might expect. Given that I am the elder, the issue is not agreeing with me, but agreeing to tolerate my leadership. It’s hardly flawless. I expect a certain amount of dissent from everyone. To be honest, sycophants are repulsive. Children are supposed to be like that, but not adults. I’ve encountered a few in my life and it always gave me the willies. Operationally, the issue is not agreeing with me, but a willingness to play along. That was what I gave when I wasn’t in charge, and I hope to receive it in return now that I am in charge. Respectful dissent is not a hindrance.

At any time, you can always pull away and start your own work. No hard feelings. When God tells you that something in my leadership is not for you, either find another community or start one yourself. It’s no different from noticing that someone is geographically removed from you; that’s a parable of human differences. Go where the Lord leads you, and put down roots there. May He add to your blessings. Just don’t stick around and try to hijack things.

And some day my time will be done and I’ll pass the baton. I’m already planning on that, given my age (67). I’m already praying for the welfare of my successor; I’ll be looking for him to show himself when the time is right. It’s not meant to be trite: pastors are chosen, elders are grown.

And covenant families are grown, too. I’m not going to make rules. Christ’s Covenant provides a sort of law code for those who need training wheels. It starts with the Code of Noah, but there’s more to it than that. It’s what we offer those who haven’t yet developed to the point they can sense their own convictions. This is how I can extend my covering as shepherd over those who still don’t know who they are.

Clearly, this is not “rule of law”, but it’s also not “rule of men”. This is simply how God allows us to experience His reign in our lives.

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