Finished Paul’s Letter to the Colossians today. Zipping along toward the next volume in the Ancient Truth series. You can find the results here (site gone).
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ehurst@radixfidem.blog
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The Holy Spirit surely moves here at my keyboard when I study for the Bible lessons. He typically moves differently when I teach it in person.
I added a paragraph to the text of my notes on Zechariah 5 regarding the second vision, where the winged ladies take the basket away:
We often forget in our modern Western world that the fundamental flaw of feminism is demanding control over every factor in the nesting instinct. A part of the curse of the Fall on women is seeking that control mostly in a materialistic and political sense. Zechariah here assumes such an understanding, that women of faith know they have to let go and trust their men and their God. The little goddess in the basket represents the worst of the fallen instinct in women, which manifests today as feminism. Most people don’t recognize that feminism is simply another face of middle class merchant culture, part of the symbolic identity of Babylon. Godly women would try to keep this nasty instinct out of their community, as do the winged motherly figures in the vision.
Zechariah presents two visions of God cleansing the land. If the people turn in their hearts to His holiness, He responds by granting even more holiness.
First comes a massive scroll floating in air. The wording refers to the common image of a judgment handed down from Heaven’s throne. Not merely the Land of Judah, but the whole earth is covered by the curses of God’s Law Covenants. The Angel notes the two representative sins selected from the middle of the two tables of the Decalogue. Theft is a sin against your fellow man and deception a sin against God. If the people of Judah will cling to the Covenant, their holy influence could change the whole world. God’s curse against sin could destroy everyone on earth who clings to evil, but the faithfulness of His people releases judgment against all sin.
In the next vision, the Angel of the Lord calls attention to something departing. He first points out the thing itself, a basket roughly the size of our modern bushel. Normally it would by holding grain, a standard symbol of commerce. The Angel notes this symbolizes the most important thing in the minds of most people: material wealth. There is a lid of lead on the basket weighing a talent (30kg) necessary to keep the contents inside: a tiny female figure. She tried to get out as soon as the lid was lifted, but the Angel pushed her back down and closed the lid. He referred to her as the symbol of wickedness.
Then we see this basket is born aloft by two women with large wings from a stork, a maternal bird. They were doing the right thing, observing their proper role. They were bearing this basket away to Babylon, where a temple would be built for the little goddess inside, and she was sure to like it. In symbolic logic, there is no place for female deities except on the side of Darkness. Women are forbidden to rule over men. All goddesses are evil; women cannot handle power without harm. In this case, we have a goddess of commerce, the symbol of Babylon’s ancient fascination with material wealth through commerce. That’s where she belongs.
It’s not hard to see where John got some of the symbols for his Apocalypse. God supplies all our needs; seeking the things themselves is inherently evil. This is the fundamental claim in the Law of Moses: Seek God and He will provide all needs. Seek your needs and you’ll forget God, ending up accursed.
I’m trying to find fresh ways to package up my weirdness so folks can decide with minimal effort whether I am worthy of their attention. It’s not a sales pitch, because I really don’t mind rejection. I just want to make sure your rejection is fully informed.
The most important thing to know about me is my epistemology. That’s a fancy word meaning basic assumptions about reality, things we don’t debate, but we might describe them so you’ll know what to expect. I’ve outlined my epistemology before and it should answer those who really need a longer explanation.
If you were raised in any part of Western Civilization, you are under a heritage, a background of influences which include the Enlightenment. Pertinent point: Western Civilization at its core is Aristotle filtered through the ancient Germanic tribal culture. It’s not entirely rational, but carries a very deep stain of irrational assumptions. But then, Aristotle comes to us through Greek Mythology, too, so purity is simply not a reasonable point of contention in the first place. It can be boiled down to saying Western Civilization is inherently materialistic, worships youthfulness, and recognizes nothing that cannot be measured (owned and controlled) by human perception.
I cling to Hebrew epistemology (asserting it is also not the same as Jewish). That’s a particular branch of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) epistemology. Aristotle rejects the ANE, and quite bluntly so. The ANE regards Aristotle as a subordinate clause, a lower default acceptable for very limited use. Thus, ancient Hebrew intellectual assumptions about reality include much of what Aristotle taught, but don’t give it much weight. Hebrew is not the enemy of Aristotle, but Aristotle is the enemy of Hebrew.
Thus, of particular importance to what I do here is my assertion that holding to the Western epistemology guarantees you cannot understand the Bible. Your subconscious mind will be imbued with an arrogant assumption you do understand it, and better than those who wrote it. That’s wrong. Further, the Hebraic approach is what God designed as the proper viewpoint for humans in this world, so if you don’t embrace it, you fight God.
Good luck with that.
(This post becomes a brief reference point for future discussions.)
No other force among men on this earth can equal that of family bonds. No one is more influential on you than people close to you.
What made Hitler so powerful? That faux family feeling. The allies who won WW1 were vicious in victory, crippling Germany extraordinarily. The German people feared, and Hitler built on that fear, feeding and fostering greater fear while offering a false solution. Today, almost every Western government is doing the same thing. As we chase the threads of this idea back through history, we see it was not so powerful before the birth of Western Civilization.
The one best legacy of the West is isolation. The one best legacy of Hebrew society was the very opposite of isolation. The whole aim of Moses’ Law was social stability, a sense of safety and support, a context in which the revelation of God would make the most sense. Outside that context, you cannot hope to understand revelation. It goes back farther to the Covenant of Noah. Through Hebrew eyes we see the essential demand from God was for household elders to restrain their wayward children. In case you missed it, a major failure in Eden was Adam’s laziness in his calling as spiritual shepherd. The social stability God was demanding in Noah’s covenant would come with a harsher crackdown from the clan and tribal elders in a world where no other social structure was imaginable. If you didn’t live in an extended family setting, you were fair game for anyone who felt threatened by your presence. Ostracism and isolation was death.
God says that is how it should be until the end of time. We don’t see that easily from our Western perspective because it’s alien to our culture. Satan has succeeded handsomely in nullifying God’s Laws by making them impossible to understand.
Our human nature demands a safety net, a social structure which protects and gives stability. Every social system other than God’s ideal offers only a poor imitation at best. The West fundamentally destroys that tribal structure so that other forces can gain control. The pretense of objectivity, utterly impossible with humanity and worthy of ridicule, renders us all vulnerable to any number of predators. The worst predator of all is non-family government. Under the guise of public order and welfare, the most unimaginable crimes are committed, and people are taught to think of them as “good.”
Nothing — no, nothing — replaces the power of your family influence except the Spirit Realm. That Higher Plane is inherently familial in nature. When you are drawn into the family of God, nothing else on this earth matters. Since most of humanity have no genuine connection to the Spirit Realm, we who have it are obliged by God to emulate the essence of it here on earth. Every evil in human society on earth today hinges on keeping the family out of things, making a virtue of people “standing on their own”. People cannot, do not, and will not ever stand on their own. That is an idolatrous false image of what is possible. God will insist they fall. You can picture it as the nature of things or His active hand, or any combination of the two, but everything raised against God’s divine plan for humanity will fail.
Here on earth, the very closest we can come to a spiritual family structure is not in the blood kinship, but in the covenant. Kinship alone is not enough; covenant trumps kinship. The Law of Noah demands families commit themselves to a covenant of social order — that is the substance of what Scripture says in its own context. Any structure, any legal system or policy, which seeks to reduce the covenant ties among men is an attack on God.
Want to reduce drug abuse? God will support a program in which family reaches out to their own and works with the problem child until they regain that measure of self-control necessary to escape substance addictions. Teach them to lean on family, not their own devices.
Want to reduce tort liabilities and lawsuits? Make every person involved in a company personally responsible for results; remove the legal fiction of corporate “persons”. Require everyone with any portion of ownership to work personally in the business; permit no other forms of investment. This removes the incentive to abuse everyone and anyone for the sake of profit. Yet it does not prevent profit. If the entire operation is family, there can be no union-management conflicts, and abuse of the consumer is much less likely.
This won’t solve every problem, but will reduce them to manageable levels. Even warfare becomes almost sane. If we want any of the good things we claim we desire in this world, we have to radically remake our world by remaking our understanding of what God demands.
Nothing replaces that personal touch.