Arresting Mysticism

Posted on January 10, 2013 by ehurst

I am a Christian Mystic. I follow Christ, who was a Hebrew Mystic. At least once, He cracked a whip and hit some people not too long from the time He surrendered and died.
The Post-Modern Western approach to this complex image is slicing and dicing until any idiot can grab any part of a false image for their fantasy obsession. Obviously, I don’t like that approach. If you analyze the testimony about Christ from the viewpoint of His own culture, you get a different image. He cracked a whip when it was necessary to fulfill eternal moral imperatives, to shine the light of truth. It was God’s justice to drive those thieving thugs out of the Court of Gentiles in the Temple; Israel’s sole existence was making a way for Gentiles to approach God. It was personal for Jesus. He stood before His Father personally responsible for that justice. It was the same justice by which He surrendered to the criminal abuse and death. If you understand the justice of God, you can understand that complex image quite easily.
I’m not particularly brave. Pain hurts me and I generally try to avoid it. This world is terminally broken and a lot of pain is simply unavoidable. That’s a mystical understanding, because it brings into this broken realm truth from some other realm. I expect a lot of pain before I’m allowed to leave this world. In clinging to the justice from the Spirit Realm, I expect I’ll have more than my share of sorrow in this Fallen Realm. I’m not eager for the pain, but eager for the justice. I’m also eager for my departure.
In God’s justice, there are restrictions on that departure. I have to wait on His hand to bring death as a final blessing in this world. It will probably be a complete surprise, but it will never be bad news. It will probably hurt, but hopefully not for too long. I’m no hero. While people do bear pain with grace, we aren’t really designed to handle too much of it. The wiring in our systems can be overloaded and the alternative mechanisms aren’t reliable, in the sense we don’t have a clear understanding how to use them. They are there, but tricky. So it’s common sense to avoid pain when you can, but not if that avoidance conflicts with justice.
In this world, an awful lot of things people have labeled “justice” are very much in conflict with what God calls justice. A critical element in Christian Mysticism is trying to understand the difference. Not simply in theory, but in application. It includes trying to perceive the moral fabric with spiritual eyes to the point we see grand trends. The current trends are more against justice than for it.
I’m a former Military Policeman. While hardly the same thing, there is a huge overlap between what I did and what civilian policemen do. As part of our work, we were exposed to a lot of their training and philosophy, if only because we had to work alongside them so often. During the time I served, our rules were looser; we had more authority in our own realm to act against violations. For example, we were encouraged to shoot long before their rules of engagement called for it. Not any more. Things have changed and they are now more likely to shoot than the military. Worse, their rules for handling those arrested is far looser than the military would ever allow. Abuse isn’t simply common, it’s almost mandatory.
I’ll reduce for you many hours of reading fair and impartial reports of civilian police behavior in the US: Innocence means nothing. It is their job to lie and say whatever it takes to get you into custody simply because the system demands a certain amount of people be incarcerated. The people at the top are utterly certain almost everyone is a criminal who hasn’t been caught yet. If they can’t get you by the rules, then they’ll bend the rules like Gumby dolls. Policemen are under fierce pressure to invent violations and lying is simply built into the system. If the policeman stops you, the chances of decent treatment are not even 50-50 in your favor any more. Abuse it far more likely than not. Worst of all, it’s perfectly legal. It’s policy.
I’m not referring to our common American mythology about what’s fair and just. Forget that. I’m referring to God’s standard of justice, which is most certainly not the same thing. Americans have never really understood biblical justice, but used the Bible at one time as a source of words and phrases to support their Western Post-Enlightenment notions of justice. No, as a Christian Mystic, having embraced the ancient Hebrew standard of justice, I see injustice from an entirely different angle. For those of you poorly acquainted with the real biblical standard, the point is not a matter of whether or how much current civilian police policy is unjust, but in what manner they are unjust. We don’t have room for that right now, so I’ll save you some time: Don’t get arrested if you can avoid it. You will not be treated justly. In broad general terms, God will not require you to submit in every context.
I’m not suggesting you spend your days finding ways to provoke government officials. Indeed, we should avoid provoking anyone at all. It’s not hard to figure that out. However, walking in the Father’s justice will do that despite your best efforts to avoid provocations. Do what’s right; always keep an eye on the moral imperatives, as they are not a simple matter of rules and laws. It requires a living connection, a mystical awareness of context and divine purpose, of a call to mission. All the more so as the context continues degrading. It’s going to get worse. At some point doing what is truly your divine imperative will get you in trouble with the authorities.
At that moment, you’ll have to decide what God requires of you. He still has plenty of miracles for all occasions, so don’t despair. But be prepared in your soul for the moral imperative to fight. Now, in this quiet moment of reading my silly drivel, consider the probability justice and mysticism means you won’t be taken alive. Fight; make them kill you. In broad general terms, what they plan to do will make you wish you had. In terms of God’s moral laws for humanity in this Fallen Realm, you need not submit to what they will surely do to you.
I won’t suggest it’s worse than what Christ suffered, but it will be at least as diabolical. We have in our government service today a broad darkness, a foul spirit of evil the human mind cannot comprehend. The people involved who aren’t the source of this are nonetheless overwhelmed by it. Ostensibly decent cops will treat you so bad you’ll be shocked. You cannot trust them to do right in the first place; the likelihood of compensatory justice later is ludicrous. While submitting to this may well be God’s plan for you in that moment, don’t assume it is before you face it. Add to your ruminations the option of going down fighting. Not simply some pitiful clawing of the floor as they taser you into submission, but develop a tactical awareness of how these things work. Develop a fighter’s instinct for what they won’t expect.
Never betray the intent before you need it. Edginess is not your friend. The mystic is placid and serene in the face of pain and death. We expect sorrow to come and our cynical humor about it can serve well in all sorts of confrontations. All the same, in one corner of your mind, never forget that the whole world is under a very nasty evil spell. It’s not simply taking advantage of you to steal your stuff. These people have already trained and equipped themselves to torture you and will not hesitate to push you over the brink into a slobbering moron far less than human. I’m sure you are familiar with the phrase, “a fate worse than death.” The ugliest secret about the CIA and Abu Ghraib is that they’ve brought this home; your local police department is slowly being infected with that same unspeakable sickness.
In the Old Testament, we often find the ethic stated in terms of, “Be men and fight to the death. Would you prefer to live as slaves of demons?” Israel wasn’t the only nation with that moral commitment.
The invasive moral disease won’t be everywhere at the same time, but it’s been here in parts of the US for quite some years. It may not be to the same degree where you live, but that’s only because they haven’t faced real resistance. Or maybe you simply don’t know. Nothing in this is about winning some battle against darkness, as if we could gain any hope of fixing this broken world. It’s not about spite against the foul oppressors, as if making them pay will serve any noble cause. We don’t expect anything to change until it simply runs out of gas on its own. It will; these people will eventually turn on each other. That won’t be soon. Before that comes, it has to be unleashed against us who aren’t part of that system. We have a divine mission to shine the light regardless of the darkness, but that light must point into the darkest corners to serve its purpose. We don’t resist people; we resist the Darkness that uses people.
When the Lord is ready to extinguish your lamp, be aware it can come in all different shapes and sizes. You won’t get out this world alive, so consider the manner of your death. God may demand I go through some modern version of crucifixion. He hasn’t told me and I suspect He won’t give me much advance notice. What I do have is permission from Him to consider all the possibilities. I also have a mandate to share it with my readers. If the option presents itself, don’t be taken alive when oppression decides you are the next victim.

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Breakpoint?

Posted on January 9, 2013 by ehurst

The US is not like other countries. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s good news for you, regardless of your own location. This is not about good or bad, but the reality of what is.
I’m wondering how much of the current political rhetoric about firearms is inevitable stupidity and how much is simply distraction. The POTUS has promised to use Executive Order to change national gun policy, in part because grandstanding in Congress was doomed before it started. The 2nd Amendment is mostly symbolism these days, but the tensions are pretty high and a significant portion is genuine. Unlike other countries, I rather think this is guaranteed to bring bloody revolution here. I rather think that is the intent.
Granted, most gun owners don’t have the stuff to use them in accordance with the popular slogans. They might try to hide them from confiscation, or even reporting, but actually killing troops/cops on confiscation missions is highly unlikely. On the other hand, getting troops/cops to carry out such a mission is also pretty unlikely in every locale. Sure, NYC and a few other urban sewers, but the majority of guns are safe. Indeed, more than a few states would flip the bird to the POTUS, some quite literally. At this point, almost anything the POTUS does will provoke a genuine political revolt.
God alone knows what’s ahead. It ranges from some tiny incremental adjustment in federal policy and more political hysterics, to serious bloodshed very soon.
My cynicism still sees one last money grab by the plutocrats, most of whom profit indirectly from gun and ammunition sales. Squeezing the last few dollars out of a crashing economy could reasonably include such a ploy. It’s possible this will turn into that ugly moment we’ve all been fearing, expecting and unable to predict. We may all be surprised at how many of us, how many places, never seem to notice. That is, nobody has a good estimate on how widespread will be the “business as usual.”
Can you keep a secret? I tend to think my locale is one of those unlikely to see upheaval. Changes, sure, but even our local plutocrats aren’t in a hurry to flee. There’s only so much wool you can pull down in front of eyes before it stretches too thin. Corruption and sneaky dealing against the masses we got, but too many in the state government here are on the side of the masses if you push them too far. The veneer is mighty thin. I believe most Okies professed a deep hatred for the Republican nominee last election, but Obama didn’t win a single county.
Still, I’m pretty sure this will get noisy. And I’m keeping an eye on the other stuff the federal officials are doing while this has everyone distracted.

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Starting the Old Testament Books

Posted on January 8, 2013 by ehurst

Having finished my commentaries on the New Testament, the obvious next step was preparing my Old Testament material for publication. Granted, I haven’t yet written commentaries for all of it, yet. I’ve done the Major Prophets and am nearing the completion of the Minor Prophets via our weekly home worship and study.
I had begun working through Isaiah again as the next book, but something wasn’t right. I always pursue those uncomfortable feelings, because it typically reveals something God has to say. In this case, it now comes to me that I need to rewrite my earliest materials, begun shortly after leaving the military in 1993. My first home computer was used primarily to write a Bible History study.
I revised and taught this material when serving at Grace Baptist Church, rural Madison County, TX. That was ten years ago.
It would seem the logic is this: In order to make sense of the Old Testament books, I need to establish first for my readers a rough chronology, something the Hebrew people would have taken for granted. They didn’t know it as we know such things, but they were fully aware of a lot of background we can scarcely recover these days. Too much of what floats around these days purporting to be a record of that background is untrustworthy. The purpose behind the modern collection is not necessarily the same as that for the Old Testament itself.
It leaves us with trying to bridge the gap between the ancient Hebrew cultural and literary context and the modern assumptions about reality. Here is the rewritten introduction to my Summary of Old Testament History —
The primary purpose for the Old Testament as it now exists is revealing why we have Christ. There is no pretense of answering all the questions of any particular age, much less ours today. Rather, we are required to examine the claims on their own terms. This requires we enter another realm; indeed, the Bible assumes the reader has already been drawn into that world and needs to understand what is required to live there. Only by accident does the Bible offer any sort of apologetic to those outside that realm. It isn’t supposed to make much sense unless you are driven to obey what you find before you find it. It is already difficult enough to understand for those so driven. This study offers no grand scholarly defense of anything, but pretends to open doors for those who struggle to make sense of something they already know they need.
The Bible must be read from its own context, which is the ancient Hebrew culture of the Nation of Israel, while under the Covenant of Moses. In Hebrew literature, context is everything. The writers of each portion assume a certain amount of common knowledge among the readers. From where we stand today, we find ourselves too often at a loss to understand the importance of what is written because we lack that context. Reconstructions are often a matter of on going debate. We would be fools to demand and expect all details be resolved to our Western cultural standards. Instead, we walk in faith, trusting God for two things in particular. First, that God has preserved the text with sufficient fidelity to the originals that we can bow the knee to what the Bible demands of us as if it were God’s own words. Second, we trust He has preserved sufficient knowledge of how to read that text so we can obey Him according to His satisfaction.
The study aims to provide a rough outline of Old Testament chronology. While dates are offered in the typical Western notation, no one should assume these dates are certain. We should acknowledge there is plenty of sincere debate, that part of it rests on the very questionable assumptions of dating the history of other nations, Egypt in particular. Modern Western dating of Egyptian chronology is frankly a house of cards, so the best we have is a working estimate of dates. What matters far more is the apparent order of events and less the numerical dates. This study builds on certain assumptions merely for the sake of convenience. If the Hebrew authors didn’t bother to nail it down so precisely, it must not have been too important.
The starting point is a desire to know what God demands of us. He preserved a portion of writings from the people He called to bring His revelation to the world. It is utterly impossible to extract from the Scripture narrative all the details that would satisfy our curiosity. The is the story of redemption, not the story of humanity from any presumed objective point of view. Beware the tendency to think we have the whole story. What we have is what matters for the sake of our obedience to God. A primary difference between our context today and that of the ancient Hebrew people is the very fundamental assumptions about reality itself, the intellectual frame of reference regarding what matters in the first place. We seek in this study to bridge the gap between those two contexts.

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Mysticism Notes 2

Posted on January 7, 2013 by ehurst

One of the hardest habits to break is taking too seriously your human perceptions. That’s because the hardest truth to grasp is how this world is one big lie.
Paul wrote several different places in his letters that human sorrow serves the purpose of driving us out of our human selves and into His arms. That fancy imagery translates properly into the clinical act of disassociating from your human attachments. We learn that we continue operating within the false realm of the spiritual prison, but build a greater trust for revelation. That our prison of false “reality” is at war with revelation should offer no surprises.
I could wish for a switch I could turn off and stop my emotions from dragging me down to wallow in the prison existence again. It’s not that easy. Everything in our wiring militates against the truth. Even the truth God permits us to see through His Laws is hard to credit. Yes, I have every confidence in God’s Laws, but setting up an experiment to prove it all clinically is not going to happen. The Laws don’t work that way. Mercy can open the door of a human heart to believe the Laws; grace alone can awaken a dead spirit to the higher truth. Once those things happen, you are in a war with yourself and over yourself.
Your emotions and intellect can quickly become traitors to the cause of truth.
I will offer this one thing: For those of us whom God has awakened, the multiple failures of our human expectations are proof we cannot trust the flesh. The hardest lesson to learn then, is pulling away from your own feelings and thoughts, of recognizing there is something in you above the intellect which knows the truth and tries so hard to break through the blindness of the flesh. That comes close to a clinical description of faith, learning to trust that inner voice from a higher plane.
The image of Mr. Spock from Star Trek is fiction, not humanly possible. From the earliest times of recorded human thoughts, we recognize people have tried to build a life around pure reason. It ain’t happenin’. It won’t fix anything, least of all your own internal conflicts, never mind the conflicts around you. Plato’s brand of mysticism is a lie, one of the greatest threats to Christianity still today. He did his best to destroy the biblical concept of the spirit and the Other Realm by insisting there was nothing beyond the reach of reason. Aristotle made it only worse. If your spirit remains dead, I suppose you don’t have anything better to hope for, but for those called into the Spirit Realm, it’s a detour into lies.
Christ is seated on His throne in Heaven and Heaven is a realm apart. It is the ultimate reality, while this existence here below is a lie.

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Mysticism Notes 1

Posted on January 6, 2013 by ehurst

Mysticism is the assumption your mind is neither capable of handling everything, nor even the most important things, but that some other faculty in a higher realm must be the center of ultimate decision making.
Law is for the flesh. It is an expression, a manifestation of moral imperative. It is not the imperative itself, but a transmission of it in lesser terms the mind can handle. It’s a frame of reference that the mind acknowledges cannot fit every context. This is why legalism, or anything smelling of legalism, is inherently immoral. It makes the Law into a god, a blasphemous reduction of God to a mere intellectual apprehension. It makes morality into mere conduct without any commitment of the soul. Legalism always fails.
The Law cannot be expressed in such unvarying terms in human language. Without acknowledged loopholes and variations, the result cannot be just. Justice is not an objective precept standing on its own; it is wholly subject to the person of God. The intellect cannot go there, so the intellect must bow at the feet of something higher in the soul.
I can say it’s Lawful to pirate software, in the broader sense, because of how I perceive the Laws of God. I have enough confidence in this assertion to say, “Thus saith the Lord.” That doesn’t mean it’s always a good idea. The Spirit behind the Law may well pull me in a different direction for reasons I can’t state. I can state with full prophetic confidence the political system of the US is wholly unjust and stands under God’s wrath. Even the Law recognizes it’s still unwise to reject cooperation with the laws of the land.
Yet there are surely times when defying the laws of this land is utterly necessary. That includes recognizing you are likely to be punished for your defiance. That’s part of the price we pay for moral purity. We read in God’s Laws the principle that we cannot touch His anointed rulers. Not a single president in US history was anointed by God in the sense of someone who submitted to His revelation and sought His approval. Some claimed it, but their actions indicate not a one of them cared nearly as much as they claimed. Some were decent; none were good. But the principle of the Law is not a matter of such precision. Rather, it places a burden upon the servant of God. We aren’t supposed to play at divine policemen setting things right by removing offensive rulers. We take the position God is in charge of such things and prefers we keep our hands clean of such matters. He’d rather use sinners to kill sinners.
Still, resisting evil in government officials is an option in the Laws of God. Could we imagine for a moment someone spiritually dead who, for whatever reason, is moved to implement God’s Laws, we allow they could still be just even if they find it necessary to commit violent acts against government officials. The Laws of God do leave that door open and are fairly clear in expressing the narrow parameters where it would be justified. Once you adopt the frame of reference, it’s plausible. You’ll also understand it’s unlikely. Still, if a policemen is committing rape or murder, regardless of that badge of office, go right ahead and stop him; if necessary, kill him. All the more so if you have reason to believe his peers and the system behind him are unlikely to take appropriate action. If you can’t imagine that scenario, as a former cop I will assert that you are stupid. Yet, you surely know it will cost you much if anyone else knows you did it.
At the moment of action, those of us spiritually alive must keep a listening ear to the Spirit. We assume things are not what they seem. We don’t train up our bodies like ninja warriors to react without consideration. Just the opposite; we train our instincts along spiritual considerations. That’s our primary duty. We hope the Spirit-spirit communion will take over first before our brain has time to process.
This realm is broken, utterly false. If you start from this realm and what your damaged mind can build, the result will remain utterly false and broken. If you start from revelation coming down from a higher realm, you discover the mind is required to formulate a plausible course built on foundations it cannot duplicate from its own resources.
To the nonspiritual minds, what we do looks like an emphasis on deductive reasoning. We start with immutable assumptions and strive to interpret the context in light of them. This is true, as far as it goes. It is hardly so hide bound when properly done, but the accusation sticks because for far too many people claiming spiritual enlightenment, we see that very thing. We see where they operate from a mere intellectual position, and they have bound themselves to obeying what the intellect can handle. The spirit is far higher. Indeed, the spirit is able to process things before they happen. The mind can only guess and imagine, but the spirit can know beyond all physical proof and fact the precise spiritual and moral nature of things from an eternal perspective. It’s not simple deductive reasoning, but something far beyond mere reason.
This is why, without the slightest hint of apology, I assert mysticism is the way of Scripture. While I am surely up against the ropes with a vast collection of false notions regarding mysticism, particularly among Christians, I cannot allow their lies to inhibit the truth in my soul. Yes, I am in my own little world, which happens to a place where eternity bulges into this fallen plane of existence. Care to join me?

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Zechariah 8

Posted on January 5, 2013 by ehurst

The theme continues: What would God do if His people adhered to His Covenant? The prophet continues making the case that throughout her history, Israel had only rarely been faithful. Yet, were there not miracles aplenty in her official archives and prophetic records? They had yet to see what mighty powers God held back because of unfaithfulness. Zechariah’s message is for them to give God a chance to do what He wanted so much to do. The miracles stood waiting in the shadow of the Covenant. As he reminds them repeatedly, this is the God who rules over all Creation. Nothing is impossible.
Was Jerusalem a mess? It was not because the Lord hated the city. Indeed, He was cooking up some serious revenge on those who did hate it. He would restore the former nicknames regarding what a wonderful place it was, the city of His Temple. Picture it: A city so peaceful and prosperous people grow ancient there in safety, while children play in clean streets. Does that sound to outlandish? Just keep building in obedience to His command and such a vision would seem rather ordinary. He’s preparing to crush every nation on every side, shatter every empire and make His city the one best place on earth to live. The Diaspora would have no reason to live abroad.
So the Lord reinforced the message of Zechariah and the other prophets, encouraging them to keep building the Temple. In His wrath, God had removed any hope of peace, cursing the land to the point even the most primitive cooperation between animals was gone. But if the Returnees really wanted to see God’s shalom, it was already rolling across the land toward them. Crops would miraculously respond and grow like the ancient times when the spies of Israel saw huge harvests, a land flowing with milk and honey. Trust Him. God was aching to make it all return, if they would simply embrace His justice.
Those fasts? All of them would become times of feasting and rejoicing, with all the memories of the siege wiped away. Try to imagine Gentiles begging to come and live as guests in the land, not least because it was the place of God’s revelation. Jerusalem would become famous as the place to find God’s face, because His people were eager to make Him known to the world. That’s the plan. Were these people ready?

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A Music Chasing Saga

Posted on January 5, 2013 by ehurst

If you can tolerate some background story, this might actually entertain you.
People give too much credit to the power of music. It can’t do much for you if you are empty. Sure, it can fill the space of an empty soul, but it won’t change anything. When the music stops, the empty soul goes back to its emptiness. Those who have something inside already now have something more.
My singing is adequate and I sing often during any given day just to keep the music of my own soul alive. For those who know, I’m a stentorian baritone with just shy of three octaves usable voice. But my voice is not commercial grade by any means and it has never been an aspiration to develop it any further. It’s useful, but not my mission. There are plenty of really good singers much more valuable to the listening audience, perhaps too many to choose from.
Central to my character is an annoyance at those who make too much of anything that isn’t God. We should be thrilled He has granted so many things which help to relieve the misery of our prison here below, but none of them can take His place. I never liked musicians who took the music itself too seriously, because they never understand music serves people’s needs, not the other way around. Same with computers and software and even grammar. You’ll notice the Grammatik, the grammar checking component of WordPerfect, tends to be annal retentive. It has its purpose, but it’s annoying to use, as is every aspect of WordPerfect. Perfect grammar is hardly necessary to communicate and doesn’t make you better. I reject a standard of superiority which makes the tool more important than the people using it or benefiting from it.
When I find a piece of music which really helps me face this crappy world, I give it more of my time. Your favorites are different from mine, I’m sure, but I’ll bet you understand the underlying principle. We invest ourselves in keeping that sort of music around for those moments when we need a little help making bad times tolerable and good times even better.
One particular song I’ve always loved, even if I have to sing it myself, is “Shine, Jesus, Shine” by Graham Kendrick, released in 1990. I first heard it on an album which came as part of a collection to which I was subscribed at one time. The series was produced under the label “Hosanna!” and is owned by Integrity Music. Like all good ideas, somewhere along the line it was hijacked by marketers who never understood what made the series so successful; the music quality plunged noticeably. We dropped it after a couple of uninspiring albums were produced. No sense paying a premium for junk. Lots of the earlier songs still play in my head, but this one song was so good, it made it into church hymnals very quickly.
All our copies were on cassette tapes, which were starting to show audio glitches from excessive wear. We left them behind in one of our moves because it was just not worth it any more to cart them around. I wanted a copy of the original song, though.
You can go to YouTube and find numerous copies of two versions. One is Kendrick himself, and the other with Don Moen. Both did a lot of work with Integrity and both are grandly talented musicians. The versions we find of that song will be pretty bog standard, though. Both are recorded in a standard congregational singing style with nice orchestration. They are not what I heard on the original album. Oddly, most copies on YouTube claiming to be from the original album recording are not. It was pretty annoying to me because the original debut recording was scored with a much more demanding arrangement, featuring a dozen or so highly successful singers as a small choir. There was simply no comparison between their beautiful work and the standard choral arrangements still scattered all over the Net.
I was determined to find the original, but I couldn’t afford the retail price of the album now out of production. It’s a collector’s item with prices start at some $50 US. (No, I’m not willing to buy any downloadable MP3 because all copies are hidden behind an incredibly annoying subscription service, worse than the original Hosanna series.) I was willing to hunt down pirate copies, but I finally found it as part of a long medley.

I like the other songs, but don’t always need to hear the whole thing. I wanted to isolate the song in question. Here’s the techie part: I used a Python script to download it under Cygwin. What I got was a large FLV file with some useless video and a random funny name that I changed to something recognizable. I then used FFMpeg on the commandline to strip out the audio (I grabbed the latest 64-bit static build because I run Win7 x64). One of the parameters allows for slicing out a particular portion of the track. After playing it through a few times, I decided the least annoying place to cut was at 5:19. The result was the long-sought copy of the original recording. I’m not going to get myself into hot water by posting that clip anywhere. The point is, sometimes it become worth the investment in a couple of hour’s worth of work getting something which really means a lot to your sanity.
There are ways to use FFMpeg with a pretty GUI face, but I don’t care for them. Look here for starters. To use FFMpeg on the Windows CLI, you either have to put it in your PATH statement or do the work in the directory where you unzipped it, which is how I do it. My incantation looks like this:
ffmpeg -i Medley-ShineJesusShine.flv -vn -ar 44100 -t 00:5:19 -f mp3 Medley-ShineJesusShine.mp3
If you care enough to investigate FFMpeg, you’ll be able to parse the details. Otherwise, it simply serves to indicate how much effort I put into it for stuff like this. When you can’t make it yourself, you have to figure out how to get it from someone else. Chances are, you aren’t the only one trying to figure out a way to get it, and someone somewhere has made a tool for it.

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Fundamentals of Morality

Posted on January 4, 2013 by ehurst

When you step back and take a long look at the Bible narrative, you find there are ways you can summarize or outline things from our modern perspective without doing violence to the original meaning. It’s nothing more than translating it into another language and culture, seeking to say the same things in terms of what morality demands of us.
Living here inside the space-time continuum is, in essence, a spiritual prison sentence. We aren’t designed for this and could never really understand how we got here, but rejecting this symbolic imagery guarantees you won’t escape it. A critical element in escape is realizing the path lies through a complete shift in our frame of reference. Our net cultural legacy has put some significant distance and obstacles between us the exit. My mission as prophet includes daily blather in which I try to offer clues to the outbound path. This post is no different.
The fundamental concept of morality has two threads. One is giving due reverence to the Creator. All the prescriptions I can offer on that could never be more than my personal experience, because communion with God on any level is entirely one-on-one. You might find that elements of my experience can offer useful clues, but you and I cannot pass through this thing the same way. There may be some overlap, surely some common human territory, but the real core of things cannot possibly be exactly the same for each of us. In essence, you are on your own. It’s between you and Him. Worship is all symbolism, because an experience with the divine is totally beyond words.
However, far more easily discussed is one particular element of that reverence, which is how we relate to each other. In this, we discover a necessity of seeing how we hold far more in common. In that we share the limitations of this spiritual prison, there is plenty of room for discussion in human terms. This particular thread of morality can be summed up in the goal of social stability.
Not the sort of Utopia any number of intelligent people can dream up, but we need the social stability which is actually possible as a grant from the Creator. There are limits simply because of the limits of our existence. Social stability is a constant give and take, a living thing, not some objective reality the mind can encompass fully. There is some limited overlap of our unique individuality before God in the eternal sphere and our numerous differences between each other on this plane below. Morality arises from what is in each of us, but is not simply an issue of what is inside each of us. It is in how we negotiate the shared space and time. It’s a matter of commitment to something living and dynamic. While each of us has a unique mixture of strengths and weaknesses, that simply guides how we implement individually the broader goal of stability. We are juggling, with inevitable failures, something too complex for any real human.
So a primary issue is preparing for the failures, our own and those of others. Social stability is not stasis, because for each improvement any of us makes, there are a dozen failures either coming out or simply touching us. In other words, precious few of God’s Laws are a matter of “how to” but of “give these results.” You are smart enough to estimate a reasonable how-to when you understand some basic issues. This is why, for example, I spend so many electrons hammering the myth of feminism in particular and Western Civilization as a whole. The fundamental assumptions are all wrong; if we don’t correct them, social stability is entirely too hard to manage.
Part of the solution is conceptualizing three fundamental human weaknesses.
One is our entirely unreasoning appetites. The body is wired to demand certain things, which bubble up into our awareness with a powerful emotional quotient. Unrestrained, such demands guarantee neither we nor our social context will last very long. Rightly so; civilization is all about learning restraint and practical ways of meeting those demands without social instability. Mind your manners, fool.
Two is our unrestrained curiosity. If we fail to realize there are sane limits, that there are some things we can experience which are inherently damaging to us, we are guaranteed to lose any hope of social stability. The mind is not endlessly resilient. One wise psychologist referred to psychic burglary, taking unjustified shortcuts into things which we cannot ever own. Instead, they will own us. Ask anyone with psychic scar tissue if they would be willing to go back and do things differently and not have to experience certain things. All of us have a trigger which reacts when someone asks if we wished we could forget certain things.
Three is our god complex. It’s built in at birth. You can call it pride or arrogance, but it is the fundamental assumption there is nothing we can’t do, nothing we can’t handle, nothing we can’t understand if we try. This is how the other two keep getting us into trouble, because humility is so repugnant. Arrogance is the default and learning that you aren’t a god is painful. It’s built into the tears of childhood, for example. There are some things we’ll never control and learning that is the foundation of human maturity.
These three elements of our human nature militate against social stability. Notice: You cannot fix other people. You can make yourself odious enough they’ll try to isolate you, but you can’t make them want what you want. The only thing you can fix is some portion of yourself. You most certainly do have the power to commit yourself to social stability, knowing before you start it will mean a measure of inevitable loss. The question is not whether you’ll lose anything, but how much. You have to balance between differing types and levels of loss; you must learn what you cannot afford to give up lest you lose your own humanity. Morality is balancing your humanity against that of others you encounter.
Critical to the path is having a reason to move along it. The one best way to structure the competing demands and costs of escaping the prison is realizing and embracing your mission, a conceptualized reason for trying. It’s a way of taking account of your unique mixture of talent and folly. It’s the better answer to the question of what you are; your individual identity is your collection of commitments. Without some focused drive to escape, you most certainly will not. You have to eliminate things you can’t do to find those you must do. Escape itself is not a motive or mission; there has to be some place to which you need to go.
I’ve fulfilled my mission for this post. Got peace? I do.

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Published Ancient Truth: John's Revelation

Posted on January 3, 2013 by ehurst

AT-Rev-cover-sm It’s up and ready. The cover image is a rock formation on the beach of Patmos, the Greek island where John was confined when he wrote his Apocalypse. Get your free copy here.

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Addendum to Notes on the Apocalypse

Posted on January 3, 2013 by ehurst

I decided it was necessary to add a final chapter to my book on John’s Revelation. It’s a prophetic review of where Dispensationalism comes from. This is the text in it’s current form:
Addendum: A Brief History of Dispensationalism
We won’t name names and define the vast jargon of various wild heresies regarding the End Times. Here we simply outline the story in general prophetic terms. If you feel led to study this mess, here is the single most recognizable term: Dispensationalism. With that, you’ll have the most easily identified gateway to a vast land of religious stupidity. Dispensationalism is a fancy word for a heresy now already old. It refers to dividing human history into periods of time under distinct covenants or “dispensations” from God. It misreads all of Scripture by rejecting the Hebrew mystical viewpoint of God’s revelation. As such, it participates in the same fundamental error of Judaism and the Talmud by embracing Hellenism.
Reading through the New Testament, we see where this false epistemology first destroyed Old Testament religion and became a primary point of conflict between Jesus and the Sanhedrin. While paying lip service to the idea of a Spirit Realm, Hellenism renders it meaningless by asserting we cannot use the concept of a separate eternity for any meaningful discussion of how men should live. This disembowels the reverence for God and His holiness, killing off the ancient assumption that man has a spirit which can connect with eternity and feed truth back down to the mind. This leaves humanity stuck with nothing higher than reason and intelligence as the means to evaluating sensory data. It also rips away the understanding man is fallen, including a fallen mind and intellect. It makes a god of reason. Placing the mind on the throne of human choice is the fundamental nature of eating the Forbidden Fruit in Eden.
God showed the futility of trying to fix the problem from the human end. A part of Moses’ Covenant was offering the national failure of Israel as proof. As Lord of all things, God steered human events to bring about a particular intellectual background best suited for revelation. We are granted glimpses of His firm steering hand on history through the early chapters of Genesis. Right after mankind was driven out of Eden, men began seeking how to claw their way back into Paradise by any means possible. It ranged from the rise of science and technology to delving into the dark corners of black magic, even playing with demons. It became utterly untenable for mankind to have that sort of freedom, as the whole world was quickly running directly into the mouth of Hell. There was no way to protect those few who had begun calling on the Lord in worship. So God killed off that first round of human failure and started over with Noah. The Covenant of Noah demanded men stand up, as Adam had not in Eden, and govern their own households as good shepherds.
It is not important to understand all the historical details which man’s mind so dearly loves. God clothes the facts in a narrative which gets down to the point of what He demands of us. To survive on earth with any hope of claiming what little good the Lord salvaged from the Fall, we must do things His way. We must seek ways to subject our fallen minds to a moral standard He revealed in the form of a framework of justice. The mystical approach is necessary, woven into the fabric of His revelation.
There was another failed attempt to ignore His revelation in the Tower of Babel. God had ordered Noah to spread out and build human communities that were tribal and somewhat closed. Mankind decided to unite themselves in one big tribe under a single chieftain who was a fearsome predator, not a loving shepherd. So the Lord enforced His original decree by making it impossible for humans to unite in communications. It’s one thing to be at peace with your neighbors, but you cannot possibly obey God’s revelation and cling to His moral imperatives if your communities aren’t clannish in the sense of small and somewhat insular. This is fundamental to human nature at its best, contrary to what most of modern philosophies assert. No one has any business meddling in your daily affairs who isn’t related by blood or covenant.
Arising from this scattered and mixed multitude of isolated cultural backgrounds was Abraham, a fellow with an education perfectly fitting him for God’s traumatic calling. Abraham left behind everything he valued as a human, took with him that deep mystical educational background and put it into practice as a nomad with little attachment to the comforts of this world. At the end of his life, his sons understood the world from a frame of reference as near perfect as possible for fallen humanity. In order to prepare the land in which they were to build a better understanding of life here, they had to leave while God did the work necessary. First, the worst of humanity needed one last chance to make things as bad as could be. In no human writing do we see anyone saying good things of these people and their ways. When His chosen nation was large enough for His plans, God brought them back to take control of the land and slaughter the loathsome inhabitants. In the process, He made life in that foreign land so unbearable for His people that they should have been eager to leave their temporary home. He even destroyed the entire collection of cults which had delved so deeply into black magic there in Egypt in the process.
His people were not ready and He had to kill off a whole generation of them until another culture arose which reclaimed the odd mixture of high intellect and mystical detachment which characterized Abraham, their ancestor. With a bit of training, they were able to conquer like few primitive nations ever. They overcame numerical and technological superiority at every turn by their trust in moral purity, yet utterly failed every time they forgot it. They had all the advantages, since the Creator Himself wrote the whole story of revelation, editing out all the junk mythology that hid His ancient truth. Once they held the territory, they lost no time in devising any number of ways to forget their past purity. Over the course of centuries, these people best prepared to build a path to the gate of Heaven kept running off to Hell. Even when God found ways to punish His people, they kept finding in the punishment itself new ways to depart from the one path of truth.
At about the same time, Satan sensed his opportunity to create an intellectual driving force to destroy the ancient mystical assumptions held by virtually all of humanity. Bit by bit, each new wave of imperial conquest bore with it a cultural and intellectual conquest which pushed human minds farther and farther from the truth. Satan turned these forces directly against the people of God, enticing them to leave the harsh nomadic life of simplicity, to embrace the urban delights of materialism. God’s people bought it all.
Their ultimate failure was directly attacking His truth in human form. Fundamental to their decision to attack God was a complete rejection of His written record of revelation. Clinging to the words and external trappings of His revelation, they tossed aside all the equipment necessary to use those words. They were Hellenized, adopting a broad mixture of intellectual assumptions that fundamentally excluded God from everything, even as they ran around waving His name over their hideous perversions. In essence, they replaced their God with their own intellects.
The grand story fizzled to a sad end. The one nation best equipped to understand God Almighty turned on Him. As if it were an experiment in a class to prove His point, God showed how the ideal setting with the direct revelation of His truth would not offer mankind a path back to Eden. When they arrived before the Flaming Sword, they could not pass because nothing on this level of existence could prepare them for it. Having made that point, God then revealed why the best He could offer that way was to give men a decent existence on this plane. That offer remains open to all humanity until Time is no more. Meanwhile, the only way to Eden had always been to face the Flaming Sword directly. So in Jesus He threw open a direct path to that Sword of Truth. Let men die in the flesh first, then discover what it meant, what it demanded of them. He saw to it the legacy of His revelation was preserved through that failed nation as something to study after facing the Sword. Die first, then begin a new life working your way backward across the narrative of revelation, back to Eden’s gateway.
This is what nailed Jesus to the Cross. Christ rose from the grave to prove He was right and they were wrong. His own people strove mightily to put Him back in the grave by murdering everyone who followed Him. The message of truth only spread farther for it. When physical violence proved pointless, they substituted a more subtle attack. Using the very same false epistemology which destroyed their own faith, Jews tried to pervert Christian teaching by emptying the gospel message of its mystical truth. This Hellenistic attack was taken up by Gentiles under the guise of Gnosticism. The Jews drifted farther into Hellenism, and could scarcely find their way back to the mystical truth. Most Gentiles in that part of the world never had a taste of Eastern mysticism, so Hellenism was something they had to actively flee. Spiritual birth was handled by God, but actually following Christ was a very large undertaking against many enemies. Eventually Rome renewed the physical violence with a passion and efficiency Jews could not have imagined.
Christians had no friends in the world. Satan raised up a series of truly predatory intelligent men in the mold of the ancient Nimrod and one of them realized the powerful unity of otherworldly Christians might offer some political opportunities. So he made some show of embracing their faith as his official governing principle and suddenly Christian leaders were tempted with political power they had never imagined possible. It was too much for them, now with three centuries of intellectual drift away from their Lord and Savior. John had seen this coming, though not in precise details.
When the leadership of church organizations had been fully compromised, pulled into political government directly, they began crushing those who clung to the old mystical spiritual understanding. Most of their legacy was lost and for several centuries only a precious few here and there carried the light. Those whose names we remember in history were not among them, for the most part, only somewhat affected by those who bore the truth. The Reformation was politics in the name of genuine faith, bearing only a small measure of a very confused genuine commitment to Christ. Arising from this somewhat religious political movement was an effort to point out how the established religious hierarchy was even more wrong. Attacks on the office of the Pope ranged all over the intellectual and political map. One of them labeled him the Antichrist.
Efforts to defend the Pope’s worldly authority also ranged all over the map. One of them was an attempt by an educated priest to write some fictional material published under a Jewish pen name. The idea was to undercut the popular Protestant teaching about the Antichrist. Up to this time, virtually no Christian scholar had ever taken literally any part of John’s Revelation. Interpretations varied within a narrow group of symbolic approaches. This priest’s book was later reworked by another much more fanciful reading of the Apocalypse in the process of translating it into another language.
Some long time later, a Protestant huckster found this book and translated it into English. The timing was perfect for the ultimate deception. He began preaching the ideas he got from the book during a time of widespread emotional stirring over End Times by people whose understanding of Scripture was far removed from the first century Christians. It has been common through human history during times of political turmoil to attach religious meaning to their political aspirations. It ends in a strain of arrogance about being God’s very own special people. It’s the same spiteful arrogance that kept Jonah from wanting any part of redemption for the Assyrians. It was the same arrogance that characterized Jews under Rome, who were spitefully arrogant toward all Gentiles and who killed the Lord Jesus. It should surprise no one that latter day Jews with political aspirations found this wild heresy useful enough to sponsor secretly some American crooked scoundrel with a talent for writing so he could put this awful heresy into his Bible study notes. American church members took it all in as gospel.
Thus was born into American consciousness the wild notions of Dispensationalism. It smells just a little bit like the gospel, but is chiefly political in aim. It keeps the Talmudic Jews front and center as somehow having unfinished business with God. It points to the Cross while denying everything Jesus taught and did, turning it all on its head. The Judaizers win again. Today’s Christian Zionism is destroying the gospel as few efforts of Satan have ever done so far. The jargon for the vast collection of beliefs about the End Times is confusing and it serves no good purpose trying to study them. The various flavors all share the same godless purpose of ripping the heart out of John’s Revelation by making it seem to say precisely opposite of what John had in mind.

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