Prayer Is Not Wasted

Posted on January 2, 2013 by ehurst

Those of us born in the West struggle to overcome the vast gulf of understanding between us the Eastern text of Scripture. Our biggest problem is reflexive unbelief. The antidote is not some mental exercise, some commanding force of will or anything like that. It’s grace all the way through the whole existence.
Even if we discover much later something we asked from God was not appropriate for whatever reason, the investment in prayer was not wasted. Sometimes we get that thing and realize it’s not what we thought it would be. Sometimes the desire for it dies and we quit asking; something inside us simply moves on and we would rather forget. Other times it simply takes a long time, or comes in some fashion totally unexpected. What really matters is the struggle to quiet the mind and emotions so you can begin filtering it all through the convictions carved into our wills by the finger of God Almighty. The investment returns a change in us, at the very minimum a greater sense of clarity.
It’s not important to list all the goodies. Nor is it important how, but several things for which I’ve been seeking God’s face were granted today. All the specific prayer requests I posted here in the past few months have been answered, at least the material items. Turns out God agreed with me that I should have them.
Of course, you know the more correct statement is I happened to agree with God about His plans.
The biggest problem moving yourself in that direction is getting a handle on your mission, being taken by a sense of calling. Of course, we can’t get hold of that until we have done the work of washing from our minds all the lies about reality, but that’s been the subject of lots of posts here. Assuming you get a grip on the reality hidden in plain sight, your first priority is knowing who you are and what you should be doing in terms of that driving commitment to something which occupies your soul. It fills you with an identity in God’s Kingdom service and everything else tends to fall into place. You start praying for stuff you want, but somehow the importance of this or that item is corrected by the drive to answer the call.
It’s only incidental some of this hit about the same time as the change in the calendar year. It’s not as if every desire of my heart has been answered, but a few material items I felt I needed for my calling arrived today. The things not so easily answered would be less tangible and are still ill-defined:

  • a desire to travel outside the US again
  • the burning desire to work around military people again
  • participation in a very mature and graceful worship community again, as we had in Europe
  • a chance to teach a live audience again…

I just imagine those things won’t be so easily answered. But today I got some of the easy stuff out of the way.

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Utterly Frivolous Post

Posted on January 1, 2013 by ehurst

The current choice of days on the calendar for marking the start of a new year makes no sense at all to me. The Winter Solstice makes more sense, but I’m not sure it matters enough to raise the issue outside this blog.
After using WordPerfect Office X5 for a few days, I now remember why I liked it, and understand all too well why I don’t any more. It is the ultimate tool for nit pickers and control freaks. When you absolutely have to have every detail your way, WP is for you. When you need something pretty sane and standard for most uses, MS Office is a lot better. I’m still hoping I can get a newer version than the Office 2000 I’m using right now, but things could definitely be worse.
Now that I’ve begun hammering the Linux/Open Source cult for being anti-user, I don’t get much hostility, but what does pop up on my radar is pretty nasty. That is, those who bother to respond are the same bunch of mindless elitists who drove me away in the first place. Never the twain shall have a meeting of the minds. I still run a Linux installation in a virtual machine, but not very often. On the other hand, I use XP Mode even less.
I’m going stir-crazy. It’s nice to get so much work done on my next book (I’m at chapter 16 of John’s Revelation), but the cold weather and a broken bicycle tend to keep me stuck here in the house. I did manage to cut some wood for my brother, and with this cold snap he’s using it up pretty fast. Still, I’m keeping ahead of him and it’s not a bad workout for sub-freezing temperatures.
We are reducing the size of our garden plot. We didn’t use half of the space this past year, and we don’t realistically expect to do anything big this coming season. Other changes indicate my seriousness about getting as much of my old material updated and published as soon as possible. Priorities, you know?
This prophecy calling keeps taking unexpected turns.

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Ancient Truth: General Letters Published

Posted on December 31, 2012 by ehurst

Background photo of ancient ruins standing in Ephesus.

Cover of the latest volume.

The cover art depicts an ancient street in Ephesus with one of the hills in the background. I decided to go ahead and get started over the Christmas holidays and finished just in time for New Years Eve. As always, you can get your free copy right away here.
Next is the Book of Revelation, AKA John’s Apocalypse. I rip out the Dispensationalist nonsense and stick to what John actually said, so it’s not really all that hard to read.

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2012 in review

Posted on December 30, 2012 by ehurst

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 64,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Please note the high view count over 1700 is a complete anomaly. My best days seldom see more than 200 visitors.

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Functional Madness

Posted on December 30, 2012 by ehurst

This world is one big lie, says the Bible.
Seen any good family dramas lately? Watched some serious dysfunctional behavior artfully portrayed on the screen? Was there a heartwarming resolution or did they simply wallow in it for laughs? Lying propaganda, all of it.
The biblical standard of dysfunction is anything which hinders your mission and calling. Acting sane and reasonable by this world’s standards would have kept Christ from the Cross. Psychiatrists, life coaches and Joel Osteen (et al) all want you to have a smooth existence and good success in this world. Jesus and His Apostles said don’t worry about that. They said tell your mind to shut up and listen when God’s Spirit talks through your convictions. Tell your mind to stop trying to evaluate the imperatives by any standard it can grasp. Instead, tell your mind it has only one mission: to implement what the Spirit Realm demands. Once you have satisfied the demands of the Spirit, then consider ways to live a peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world. Don’t revel in stirring up trouble.
When your whole world militates against what God considers sane and reasonable behavior, that really doesn’t leave much room in Christian faith for what the world calls “normal.” The emphasis behind the admonition to avoid stirring up strife is mostly a matter of minding your own business, not trying to correct others like some obscene truth policeman. It means allowing folks to be wrong, to carry enough humility to recognize your ideas may not fit their world, as if there actually could be some sort of objective reality that you would happen to understand. The admonition means you neither seek nor avoid attention for doing what you really must do in obedience to your own convictions.
The one thing I found missing from every religious training experience was the emphasis on clarifying your convictions. The spiritual discipline of learning what convictions are, and then learning how to bounce stuff off of them, is almost completely absent from Western Christianity. At the best of times, they make it so utterly mystifying with talk of long prayer sessions and reasoning. You might arrive at some clarification by accident, but not because the teaching helped you very much. Reading your convictions should be reflexive most of the time. The primary reason churches get this wrong is because they fear the outcome. If people really dig into their own convictions, they might decide they have to leave that particular organization and go elsewhere. Can’t have that, now, can we?
Worst of all, your departure, along with the reason for it, might cause a stampede and leave the leadership holding an empty offering basket. They have no way to pay off the huge loan for that big fancy facility. Worse, it will decimate their political leverage.
You have no duty to resolve all your dysfunctions. That’s not a godly, biblical standard, not a goal associate with Christ. The goal is your own cross. In the Bible, “functional” is peace with God, a sense you are about as close as you can get to His moral imperatives during moment. It means a resolve to keep checking because you can’t trust reality, but you simply must trust God. You cannot possibly adjust your mental vision of reality to God’s revelation when that vision is cluttered by worldly junk. If acting crazy is the only way you can have peace with God, then start raving. I might not stand next to you very much, but don’t let that hinder you. I have my own raving to do.
Peace with this world makes you an enemy of the Cross.

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Peter's Mysticism

Posted on December 29, 2012 by ehurst

Peter was executed in Rome roughly 67 AD. His letter to the Jewish Christians in modern Turkey was at least a couple of years before that, so far as we can tell. Peter was in Rome working with John Mark; Paul’s old buddy, Silas, was there to play scribe for Peter. Paul was gone. Nero’s persecution had begun and things were pretty ugly in Rome. Once it got rolling there, it would spread across the empire.
So 1 Peter is a warning to the Jewish Christians to brace themselves. Woven throughout this whole letter is the constant reminder the only proper frame of mind for folks following Jesus was otherworldly mysticism. It’s almost comical how mainstream evangelical and fundamentalist Christians here in the US struggle to keep mysticism out the discussion of Peter’s message. They have no problem with the old Germanic fatalism and bravery, or even the old Roman version of it, but that Hebrew stuff was just too much.
The idea this world does not matter, except as a context in which to show God’s glory, is just too much for those folks with all the trappings of a middle class merchant’s existence.

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Zechariah 7

Posted on December 28, 2012 by ehurst

Based on the Old Testament calendar, this message is dated December 518 BC. There came a delegation of folks from Bethel, 10 miles (16km) to the north and bit east. We recall a significant number of people escaped the Babylonian Exile and lived briefly under Gedaliah as governor. Some of them revolted, murdered Gedaliah and fled to Egypt, dragging Jeremiah along with them. However, a few stayed faithful to the new government and lived mostly in Bethel. During the long seventy years of isolation in a land mostly depopulated, they had developed the custom of solemn fasts to commemorate different events connected to the destruction of Jerusalem. The fifth month of every year they fasted for the burning of Jerusalem; the seventh month was for the murder of Gedaliah.
If the Covenant People sense a moving the Spirit of God to fast and weep over sin and its awful consequences, only a fool would resist the call. When it becomes a mere ritual, it’s worse than pointless; it mocks God and His Word. What’s the difference between feasting and fasting? Were any of the ritual observances a matter of truly seeking God’s face? Zechariah relays God’s message that they should search their own hearts about this. Were they genuinely sorry they had participated in ignoring the warnings from the former prophets back before Babylon invaded?
What does it look like when Israel obeyed the Covenant? It was a closely knit community of familial care. Unthinkable is the image of any unfortunate people suffering genuine want, because their wider community family would look after them. This is the moral imperative and there is no excuse for resentment and dishonesty. No one can explain why Israel left this community stability behind like some long forgotten tattered tent fluttering in the desert winds, while they lived in wood paneled stone houses and sharp dealings with each other. The simplicity of mercy and community welfare had not been a part of Israeli life for centuries, yet was precisely what God required as the very foundation of the Covenant. Because of this, the vast storehouse of blessing was exchanged for an ocean of wrath and sorrow.
God cried out the them even as He began closing His fist to strike, calling them back to simplicity and purity before Him. After the wrath began to rain down upon them, it was too late to wail His name. Was this in their minds when they made a show of weeping those seventy years isolated in Bethel? When God’s people make war against their own covenant with Him, they should not expect Him to keep them together as a nation in their own homeland. Their identity was their mission to reveal Him and His moral imperatives by living them. Without that, they were dust in the wind, to be scattered among the rest of humanity. All the more so did this come true when they murdered the Messiah.

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Jesus' Brother against Materialism

Posted on December 28, 2012 by ehurst

I’m running through all my studies in the Jewish Christian Letters first for content before sending them through the grammar grinders. Yesterday I finished Hebrews and today I ran through James. I recall not so long ago a gentle dispute with someone over what James had to say about materialism. The first paragraph below is more or less what I had at the start of Chapter 5, but the second paragraph I added based on that discussion:

All creation is a tool for God’s glory. People who trust in material things and worldly power cannot serve that glory. We trust the Creator, not the creation. James continues with a prophetic warning to anyone who takes comfort in their worldly wealth. The image of gold and silver corroding is not meant literally, but that they corrupt the heart. Western Christianity shares with the Pharisees a horrifying blindness to this truth: When you turn to Christ, all you are and have becomes His. If you then die wealthy, it is hard to imagine you were obedient. Call it what you will, but people in church who don’t hurry to deploy their material possessions for the Kingdom, seeking to purchase His greater glory here below, aren’t Kingdom people. James cries out in a warning: If you cling to this world, you will be owned by it; you will perish when the Lord comes to destroy this world. Let Him return to find us penniless because we were faithful stewards.
We take a moment here to crush the particular Western sin of materialism. God’s Word insists the most important thing you can do for your children is let them see your otherworldly disregard for material possessions. Using children as an excuse for being a tightwad is not supported in Scripture, any more than giving from a false sense of guilt. We have allowed the feminist nest-feathering demon to dominate our understanding of this issue. Women are cursed by the Fall, same as men, and acquiescing to their demands over every little thing that touches their motherhood instinct is as wrong as eating the Forbidden Fruit. Voluntary poverty, children and all, is not a sin if creature comforts require a spiritual compromise. Don’t let the secular world define your morality. Learn how to address your convictions, not your feelings and reason on such things. James would hammer the modern Western churches at least as much as those he addressed in his letter.

While we can point to Western middle class merchant culture, it’s not the same as saying everyone with a middle class income is evil. That I would have to say that is precisely what’s wrong with Western reading of Scripture.

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The Game Never Made

Posted on December 27, 2012 by ehurst

I don’t play computer video games. Simple card games or stuff with mahjongg tiles are okay; they serve the useful purpose of occupying the conscious intellect while other parts of my soul need it out of the way. The more expensive and expansive role playing games I avoid.
It is fun to watch my son play Fallout New Vegas on his Xbox, but I have no interest in playing it myself. I would play if it didn’t involved lots of fighting. I really do like the exploration aspect; the virtual landscape is very nice. I don’t at all mind the skills and repairing or crafting, nor even arduous risky missions. Even having to fight off more-or-less natural threats doesn’t bother me. What I don’t like is the underlying “morality” of the game, the expectation of killing so very many other people. Should you possess a more pacifist nature, the game will kill your character and you cannot progress very far.
I realize this is what sells. I realize no one is likely to ever make a game with enough moral variation to match reality. The pitiful karma evaluations depend entirely too much on a very shallow morality. People who like to help others and build a better life, for whatever underlying moral reasoning, can do a lot of that in real life. People who like to kill without any real risks can’t do that in real life, at least not at the price of a stack of computer games.
Still, I can wish for a game developer who understood that other morality and who had the same skill as the folks who give us the likes of the Fallout series. I’d be willing to save up and buy such games at a premium. They would be excellent education sources.
I can dream.

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Boxing Day and Doctrine

Posted on December 26, 2012 by ehurst

Most Americans have no idea what “Boxing Day” means unless they spent time in Europe. At any rate, I’m working away on the next volume of my series, Ancient Truth: General Letters, covering Hebrews through Jude.
In terms of doctrine there is an awful lot of confusion about things in the Old Testament. Most American Christians don’t understand how people before Christ could have a personal spiritual relationship with God. They tend to think the Law was it and Jews would like everyone to believe that.
However, the Covenant of Abraham stood long before Moses was born. Abraham’s was a covenant of grace, not Law. While the covenant Abraham had with God is the first recorded instance of personal redemption on a spiritual level, there’s nothing saying it was not possible before. The purpose of including the tales of Abraham was not to exclude everyone else from grace, but to show how God used grace in this one instance. Whatever Abraham knew of God did not originate with him, since he was one of a long line of scholarly priests in a culture of such scholarship receding back into history completely out of our view. There is ample precedent that folks in Mesopotamia had such knowledge without Moses long after the Law, too.
Abraham was called by God in much the same way as dead souls today are called into life with Christ. The difference is we have the Spirit of Christ; Abraham did not. The Holy Spirit could not be released into men’s souls in the that way until after He was first incarnated in the human Jesus. Once the Spirit of God had lived in a human form in Christ, He was available to all humanity as a part of following Christ. Indeed, it’s impossible to follow Him otherwise. Whatever Abraham had in his spirit, it was not Christ, but some other connection with the Spirit Realm. Seeing we don’t really have any way of explaining much about the Spirit of Christ in the first place, how could we talk much about what Abraham had? Whatever it was, it was the same for folks like David, Samuel and Elijah, but also folks like Melchizedek, who was an associate of Abraham long before Moses.
We learn to recognize this spiritual awareness through how the people acted, as recorded in the Bible. Whatever they had was powerful, but frankly we have it easier, in one sense. While we seem almost totally lacking in that ANE perspective on reality, we have instead a spiritual awareness which could lead us back to that world view if we pay attention. Abraham and his spiritual kin had to have that awareness first.
I sigh as I write this, because Americans know more about Boxing Day than they do the ANE world view.

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