Haggai 2

Posted on November 10, 2012 by ehurst

From the very beginning, when God first chose to reveal Himself, He warned consistently: What He would promise to do for humanity was conditional. God’s blessings in this life have always been bound up in the moral fabric woven into Creation. Prophets seldom said something would happen in any absolute sense, but offered divine contingencies. Haggai brings such a contingent message in this chapter. The time is a month after the previous message.
First, we probably have a tiny few who survived the full seventy years of exile and could dimly recall Solomon’s Temple. While much had been lost during the reigns of evil kings in Jerusalem who succeeded Solomon, the size and grandeur had remained. During this time of reconstruction, it was painfully obvious the Returnees had little of the resources and equipment Solomon used. Instead, it was a much smaller undertaking laid out in the first outline of stone work. You can be sure those who remembered would have despaired of seeing the likes of the First Temple again. God’s answer was, in effect, He wasn’t insulted. The issue was obedience, not man’s measures of architectural glory. He told them not to fear He would be angry with a smaller Temple.
Did they want to see a grand and glorious Temple again? Trust in God. He could do it, would do it if they only believed and obeyed. Haggai declares God can shake all human governments loose, turn things upside down and make Jerusalem the center of the world. Every nation would bring their finest treasures, if these people building the Temple would simply embrace the vision of taking the Covenant path before them. It could happen!
Two more months pass, and it’s around the first of December 520 BC by our reckoning. Time for another message wrapped in symbolism. Was ritual holiness contagious, or was defilement? It was the latter. The people had been bringing their offerings during that time when they refused to obey God. Therefore, they were unclean, and their offerings were unclean. It’s not the amount of the offering, any more than it depends on the size of the Temple building, but it depends on the obedience of the people under the Covenant. So now, as the last food from a bad time was consumed during these winter months, God promises obedience will bring such a harvest as to wipe away the memory of the current hunger. Today they were walking in obedience, and everything they touched was blessed. Just you wait and see, says the Lord.
One final message came to Haggai at that time. The Lord told Zerubbabel he was the man. Because he had taken seriously God’s command through Haggai, the Lord was prepared to raise him up as the next real King of Judah. And instead of being some petty regent in a backwater pile of rubble, he could be the ruler of a revived Kingdom of Israel. It could happen!
We know these things didn’t happen literally, but the principle of promise did not fail. Because the obedience flagged and their trust failed, much of what could have been did not come in their time. Instead, it waited for the Messiah for fulfillment. In Him, the literal meaning was left behind as too paltry, and the grand unspeakable blessings of these promises in the Spiritual Realm came instead.

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Clarification: The Curse of Oppression

Posted on November 10, 2012 by ehurst

Since I can’t explain, I won’t. This is a short item I sense I am required to post now, instead of working it into another post. I am determined to be obedient to such moves of the Spirit.
Regarding the warning God is bringing upon the US a rising police state: This oppressive ugliness applies across the board to all elements of power. That is, not simply public institutions of government and banks, but every partnership and every privately owned institution with any significant leverage will be in on this. That includes charitable institutions (Red Cross, et al) and even churches. We are going to see an incredible rise in the demonic abuse of centralized authority across the board. Celebrate where you don’t see it, because it will be rare.
I’ll try to give you a mental image, a hook upon which to hang this thing.
As people rise higher up in power and authority over others, they are infected with a growing revulsion for accountability, particularly to those below them in the power chain. You will see this beast growing. More and more, anyone with authority will abuse it, and in ways more alarming than before. Part of this is a growing infection, almost like a psychosis which is communicable. People who hold authority will embrace a worldview which is less humane and more paranoid about what some “horrible things” the masses might do if given a chance.
You and I know from vast experience, aside from a rather narrow selection of folks who belong in corrupt subcultures, most of the people we encounter in the US tend to mind their own business. The majority do tend to be stupid sheeple in the broader sense, utterly lacking in cynicism sufficient to resist an evil and deceptive government, but they aren’t mean and hateful. They do not go about their days seeking opportunities to break rules and get away with stuff. You could herd a random mass of ordinary citizens through a open area with cords and expensive electronic equipment in the path, they’ll point it out to each other and avoid it, stopping to help the kids step over it. Less than one-tenth of one percent would even stop to think about doing anything naughty, and those would tend to be restrained if anyone else is watching. So rare is likelihood of intentional damage, and so careful are most people about avoiding accidental damage, it’s probably safe to simply watch them go through.
The mass of Americans tend to self-organize and act reasonably, even in the most unreasonable circumstances. Watch any portal where TSA is active. Most of us know this instinctively; we aren’t surprised to see it. I’ve done it dozens of times with military and civilian folks, and when they understand the rules, they rarely break them.
Yet it’s utterly reliable that when someone gets a little authority, they begin to forget that. The memory becomes replaced by fear the herd will not do whatever it is they imagine is the right thing. As their authority grows, their distrust of human nature increases dramatically. So no one should be surprised when the likes of Bloomberg says ordinary people are not permitted to donate food to the government-run food distribution program. He would rather the program have no food at all than to trust ordinary donors to offer safe food. Instead, he has to waste vast sums of tax money on the most expensive food people don’t even like, supplied by union-shop operations run by his cronies. Corrupt, yes, but the real issue is not even the kickbacks, it’s the reflexive fear the herds will break out of his corral and eat stuff they like. So he has the Red Cross lie to people, saying if they move from this shelter close to home, and go that one far away, they’ll have showers and washing machines … not. They’ll be in tents which aren’t even heated. Not only will there be no services, but some of their property will be confiscated in the process.
People in power take themselves, and their prerogatives, way too seriously. Good people aren’t allowed to have those positions, because good people can’t tolerate the dehumanizing process mandated as the entry to such power.
Brothers and sisters, let’s recap this prophetic message: Everyone with the least bit of power over you will become increasingly abusive. Aside from moments when the Spirit of God moves you, resistance is a sin. That’s a general expectation. God is sending this upon us because of our past failures to heed His voice. It’s too late. So instead of fighting this, the one thing God will promote is for you first to embrace a radical dependency on Him. Second, decide you can live without anything God does not provide. Third, avoid allowing yourself to want anything you can’t generally obtain by self-reliance (under God’s Laws, of course). May God have mercy on those who have dependent children and others who cannot take care of themselves, because your job is huge. God will see to it, but it won’t be fun.
Break your dependency on any and all humans who aren’t in a very strong covenant with you.

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Debate Is Dead

Posted on November 10, 2012 by ehurst

I don’t debate. I seldom even bother to argue. You will always find me willing and patient to explain as best I know how what goes on inside my head. I always do what I know is required by my God, and if I can’t help you appreciate the value of that, I leave you to stew in your own juices.
Debate solves nothing. The same people who can be persuaded by debate could easily be persuaded by much lesser means. While debate in its purest form was meant to contrast ideas using facts, even in the sterile atmosphere of college debate competitions, it’s still about trickery and deceit, and the art of presentation. It was never really examining the facts, but selective use of facts to bludgeon someone else. So you can imagine my utter contempt regarding those things people advertise as “political debates” which are little more than thinly veiled hostility between persons regardless of the ideas involved.
It’s the same sort of thing when someone accuses you of racism. There is no logical defense against that; you cannot disprove the charge under any circumstances. Nor can you disprove charges of sexism or any other “-ism” these days. Such things are merely verbal bludgeons, trump cards used to avoid anything approaching an honest debate. I don’t even bother to take umbrage at such charges. All it does is prove the person making the charge is unworthy of any fair consideration. In colloquial terms, “screw `em.” Do what you know is right, and throw away any hope of placating someone like that — pearls before swine.
We could discuss social tactics, but the finesse and subtlety required is something you demonstrate, not write about. Think about the necessity of holding civility and dealing with uncivil and unreasonable people. Civility is a good in itself, and sometimes it actually does require drawing blood, but if you don’t defend it as a critical element in your existence, you’ve already lost the one battle worth fighting. Be generous, magnanimous even, but don’t be a fool.
I press my claims, but I do so first by conduct, and words come far behind. The business of changing hearts is out of my hands, and always will be. The strongest argument I have is myself.

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Soul Seeds: By Its Nature, the Kingdom

Posted on November 10, 2012 by ehurst

Then He said, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and put in his garden; and it grew and became a large tree, and the birds of the air nested in its branches.” (Luke 13:18-19)

There were two things supposed to happen once Jesus had ascended to His throne. One of them was His Kingdom would grow massively. To some degree, this was what happened at the start. We are told by Luke of numerous converts joining the church in Jerusalem (Acts 2:41) after Peter’s first recorded public sermon. We are later told of a persecution which arose and scattered the Messianic Jews across the local region (Acts 8:1-4). Of course, the natural result was the spreading of the gospel. After Paul’s conversion, the Word went all over the Mediterranean Basin. We also have solid evidence of the Church arising in the Mesopotamian Valley and circumstantial evidence the Apostle Thomas took the message as far as India.
This Kingdom was supposed to become massive in size, large enough to shelter those who were easy prey outside the shadow of its wings. There was a sense in which this came true. We know the hordes of Germanic barbarian tribes which swept across Europe in the AD 400s were eventually tamed and civilized by the Church, in spite of the Church having become fairly corrupt by that time. Soon there were missionaries in the British Isles, in the Nordic lands, all over Northern Africa, and so on. In every place, large numbers made at least some form of commitment to Christ.
We have no way of knowing how genuine these professions of faith were, and it doesn’t matter. Judging from the quality of the theology and message, in many cases we might be tempted to say almost none really came to Christ, but they did repent of their sins. Too often there were conversions at the point of a sword, which meant nothing. Today, we know a majority of those in the world claiming Christianity as their religion are, upon closer inspection, merely cultural adherents to something which is labeled “Christianity.” That’s good for a stable society, but not worth a great deal in terms of Kingdom growth as Jesus was referring to it. They are Christian in the sense of adopting a certain set of values, not in wholeheartedly following Jesus.
Ignoring, then, the official statistics, we can still say the Kingdom is massive. We know there are true believers all over the world, including places where admitting it means certain death, or at least expulsion from their homeland. It’s not because Jesus meant His parable as a prophecy, but as a description of its nature. The church by its nature grows in size. Periods of decline, persecution, even genocide cannot invalidate that teaching. Over the centuries, the number of true believers has increased. If you and I are doing our part to follow Jesus, it will grow even greater. If it fails to grow, you and I share the blame.
Jesus said, “To what shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till it was all leavened.” (Luke 13:20-21) This was no small batch of flour the woman was working. The Greek word for “measure” here is sata, about the same as Hebrew seah — around 6 quarts. Thus, her batch of meal was about 18 quarts. And all it took was just a pinch of yeasted dough from the previous batch, and a warm damp place to keep it for a few hours, and the whole thing would change.
It should be obvious He says the second thing we should expect is the Kingdom would makes its way into every corner of the world. While it was typical in Hebrew idioms to associate yeast or leaven with sin, in this case Jesus clearly says the Kingdom is like leaven itself, not leaven the symbol. Given time and the right conditions, the Kingdom will have a dramatic impact on all it touches.
There are some who assume that impact should be something measurable in terms of politics, social reform, and the like. Jesus never did any of that. More than once the Gospel narrative points out how He avoided it when people tried forcing that role upon Him. Our impact as a leavening agent, as living seeds of truth blossoming into something far bigger than ourselves, is not easily measured in human terms. Some of it would surely be obvious. If we embrace Christ, we are embracing His teachings, a high moral standard which finds many fans among those who aren’t moved to join themselves under that teaching. The impact is subtle, not overt. We have seen far too much of Christian organizations investing massive resources in things which are too easily measured in terms familiar to those who don’t love Jesus, changing the message of the gospel into something foreign to Christ Himself. His message is not a better version of this world, just a better life within it, reflecting life from somewhere completely outside this world.
Yes, we teach the Covenant of Noah is still active, and nations are still held accountable — to God, not to us. If we do not teach this, we doom every nation to continuing sin without any chance to hear the truth. Hebrews 1:13 pictures the Father saying to the Son, “Have a seat here at My right hand until I put all Your enemies under your feet.” How do you suppose He plans to do that, when it has nothing to do with conquering the human institutions of our world? The Law of Noah is not merely an excuse to impose some different secular laws painted with Western imagery of Jesus. It’s about power over us, conquering our own individual sinful impulses. His enemies, our enemies, are we.
So while we hold forth the Laws of Noah as applicable to human government, the issue is the message. Our mandate is to tell, not enforce. Jesus enforced His Father’s will by dying.
The nature of the Kingdom of Heaven is changing things by divine power, not by any human measures. Whatever it is spreading with the sword or any other human political activity, it’s not the Kingdom. We don’t get to see how plants grow or yeast invades flour, and we don’t get to see how God works in human hearts. We are involved in the process, but rely entirely on things we cannot comprehend for the results.

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Friday Book Report 2

Posted on November 9, 2012 by ehurst

Thanks for stopping by, readers.

I’ve finished the revision of the commentary on Matthew’s Gospel. If you are dying to read the latest version, start here (site gone). This is what will be in the next book. I’m just a bit shy of half-way through the commentary for Mark’s Gospel.

It’s hard to express how much I am enjoying this, because it reminds me of things I’d forgotten. This was early in my prophetic work, and the power of the Holy Spirit was very much present during the writing of that material. I’m quite moved by reading my own stuff. Much of what I wrote was not found in the older commentaries I consulted, but I don’t remember being smart enough to write like that. The Lord moves me to write on what is before me right now, whatever that may be. I’ve learned to be patient until something has cooked thoroughly in my spirit before trying to finish up and move on to something else. It scares me when I go back and reread something which was done right.

It also gives me a powerful confidence it will bless those who read it with me. It keeps me going when I’m tired of working with a word processor and HTML editor at the same time, making sure I didn’t miss any details in formatting, etc. I’ve been trying to keep the important stuff synchronized, the stuff I keep open and free.

As always, comments and questions are welcome, because it always helps to improve the results when I’m not working in isolation.

All the previous published material at Smashwords has gone into the premium channel. As I expected, the fiction isn’t selling well, but we have had 41 downloads of TMOC and 30-some for SSJP. If you want your own copy, see the link on the right side of my blog page.

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Divine Logic 101

Posted on November 9, 2012 by ehurst

Western Civilization as a whole is antithetical to divine logic.
Every civilization stands on a unique intellectual heritage, a range of assumptions about reality. Gather together all the various ancient civilizations which have ever stood, and they would range broadly in their differences regarding assumptions about reality. Yet in the widest spread of their differences, they are all much closer together as a whole than any of them are to Western Civilization.
It’s not as if there is no overlap, no common ground by which we can find similar traits here and there between Western and other civilizations. Most of the others would understand elements of the West without difficulty, but the West seems utterly incapable of grasping much from any of the others. The West stands uniquely stupid and truculent toward all others, with a singular arrogance not found in any other place in human history. Yes, we can find arrogance in other cultures and civilizations, but it’s much easier to condemn it from within those cultures than condemning it in the West from a Western stance. And outsiders need not apply.
This arrogance is the very foundation of what we now call the West. So fundamental it is, almost all Westerners deny this arrogance exists, an arrogance which is painfully obvious to all other civilizations in the world. Swaggering is a virtue in the West; humility is virtually incomprehensible. Lip service we have aplenty, but even in our lip service to humility we arrogantly dismiss vast areas included in the concept. There is a sense in which you have to divorce yourself from the West to practice any humility.
It’s a particular struggle for those spiritually reborn. Their minds are typically still stuck in the West while their spirits cannot possibly be comfortable there. The West itself has no categories for dealing with genuinely spiritual matters; the epistemology of the West denies the existence of the Spirit Realm. This is why mainstream Christians are so uniformly un-Christlike in too many ways. There is a sense in which the West is wholly responsible for the Crucifixion in the first place. His execution came as a collusion between Rome and the Hellenized Jews alienated from their ancient Hebrew intellectual assumptions. Christ’s call to return to the ancient ways was a threat to the system.
God created an intellectual foundation, building a nation around it, as the single most suitable means for revelation. Only an arrogant Western mind can reject the difference between Western and Ancient Hebrew mentality. Only an arrogant Western mind insists the Western is the best and only proper way to look at reality, and indeed, attempts to force the Hebrew revelation to serve its peculiarities. The simple attempt to explain the difference is a major task, but I’ll try.
The West is deeply in love with stasis, while Hebrew loves life.
Consider Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, his attempt to explain the nature of reality. Most people will suffer some measure of delusion, but in theory at least, reality is within the grasp of human reason. Within a consensus of those who share this fundamental assumption, we as humans can establish a basis for discovering the nature of reality, and every part of it. This whole thing assumes reality — ultimate truth — is abstract and static. Our grasp of it may drift in and out of accuracy, but the nature of reality itself is immutable. Human knowledge of reality consists of those knowing those elements of everything and anything which are in the nature of the thing, the core of its being. We examine the doing of the elements of our world so we can use our reason to discern the being of things. We list its characteristics such that the terms do not have any fungible meanings. The issue is defining things, a word which implies establishing the boundaries, of knowing when something we see is not characteristic of the idea, but perhaps only of this particular instance of that idea.
The ultimate character of an idea is what all the instances share when they die, when they lose their living character, their uniqueness.
This is directly opposed to Hebrew assumptions about reality. That is, Hebrew thought assumes you cannot possibly know the essence of anything, nor should you care too much about that. You can know whatever it is necessary for you to interact with it, but whatever Plato meant by the idea of “reality” refers to something Hebrew minds considered inherently fungible. Indeed, they would say a Westerner deceives himself in believing he sees a static reality reflected in certain experiences of the world, only because the Westerner filters out anything indicating the contrary.
Westerners grasp how it is the nature of living things to change, to be a moving target. When it comes to humans, the complexity means a vast lore of scientific understanding is required to begin addressing human nature. While it is typically not a conscious assumption, Westerners assume it is possible to eventually discover the last variable of human nature, at least in theory. Hebrew minds dismiss the importance of even trying. That is, whatever you really need to know about humans for the sake of optimal functioning in this world, most of it is already revealed from Heaven.
Need I point out yet again Aristotle consciously rejected all revelation as having any relevance in human knowledge?
Here’s an example. Westerners understand allegory. That’s using symbols to explain something so that it’s easier to memorize and understand. The symbols are always equal to something else. In Western literature, symbols are fairly static. They may drift over time, but the whole thing can be traced and the meaning of any given allegory is always fairly precise.
Parables make no sense at all to Westerners. Hebrew symbolism makes each symbol a living thing. Every symbol is as complex as any human.
As Westerners we should have no trouble understanding how each of us may well have a character, an essence of our individual nature and personality. Something about us defines what we are as persons. While everyone we encounter can know something about us, our character is in their minds limited to what they have seen of us. Most people see only a glimpse of one or two facets. A precious few see more facets and more of each facet. Yet, even we seldom really know our own character, in that somewhere tomorrow we will encounter something which will reveal an aspect we didn’t know about ourselves. Something will elicit a response we don’t expect, because it’s an experience we didn’t already have. Complicating things further is how we are each a moving target, and today’s response will not be the same tomorrow, even if all things we can perceive are exactly the same.
In Hebrew literature, parabolic symbols are just like that. They live, and take different roles in different contexts. A seed plays one role in this parable, but symbolizes something different in another parable. Even if we can fully explain the meaning from parable to parable, the whole intent of parables is to allow each person hearing it to receive something different, something unique.
This drives Westerners mad. Reality isn’t supposed to be like that. We should be able, in theory at least, to come to a consensus about what a thing is and what it means, and not have to worry about it being something else in another context.
To the Hebrew mind, that sort of thing is arrogance, a petulant demand reality conform to some arbitrary definition. It’s as if the Western mind demands control, even ownership, over things it cannot possibly grasp.
Western logic asserts anything we can’t theoretically grasp does not exist. Divine Logic denies anything we experience on this plane, anything our minds can possibly understand, even in theory, is of any great importance. The Bible is written from Hebrew logic, which strives to mimic Divine Logic.

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Soul Seeds: What Time Is It?

Posted on November 9, 2012 by ehurst

Four parables in a row recorded by Luke deal with repentance. The first is the parable of the Weather Signs:

Then He also said to the multitudes, “Whenever you see a cloud rising out of the west, immediately you say, ‘A shower is coming;’ and so it is. And when you see the south wind blow, you say, ‘There will be hot weather;’ and there is. Hypocrites! You can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it you do not discern this time?” (Luke 12:54-56)

How often have we heard people going through verbal gymnastics trying to make this verse about End Times? There is no reason to make the phrase “this time” fit any other period than the one in which Jesus lived at that moment. Whatever the term means, it has to include that. This is one of those sections where Luke avoids citing precise details to prevent fixing the date and place. What we do know is what often happened while Jesus traveled about teaching and healing: huge crowds would gather (see 12:1). Instead of chasing the precise context, Luke wants us to keep our eyes on what Jesus teaches about the nature of His ministry.
We have already seen in the last lesson where He debunks the notion of peace in a fallen world. Here He continues where John the Baptist left off: This is the one best time to repent, before everything changes forever. I am convinced John and Jesus both had in mind the coming final Fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. This was the last opportunity for the Jews as a nation to get it right. We know they did not, and after the Roman General Titus destroyed the city, the Jews never again rebuilt the nation as it had been. The modern version of Israel is simply a secular political entity, with no significant concern for the Law of Moses, only for their ethnic identity and their ancient homeland. The majority of modern Israelis are ethnically Jewish people, but very few are actually followers of Judaism.
At any rate, there was no Judah or Israel for almost 2000 years. This was a direct result of rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. He warned against this very thing with the next parable, about making peace with one’s adversary at law (12:57-59). Jesus was saying God was about to take the nation to court, and they would surely be found guilty. Thus, the only escape was to make peace before court was in session. There was no time to lose.
On a similar note, Jesus responded to the latest news around that part of the world, where some Galilean extremists had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem at one Passover (13:1-5). They had been such pests to Pilate he had them killed in or near the Temple grounds just before they presented their sacrifices. There was also a reference to the collapse of the Tower of Siloam. Because the Jewish religion had become so focused on this age and this life, there was little reference to any afterlife. Indeed, the Law of Moses had practically nothing to do with saving one’s soul — virtually all its promises, blessings and curses applied to this life. The Jewish religion was very confused about this. Thus, when disaster struck, there was a popular myth that it was somehow due to sin in the life of the victims.
Jesus never denied the victims had been sinners, but retorted they were no worse than most any other Jew. The nation as a whole had long rejected a heart for God in search of a mere code of conduct. While the code was virtually impossible to keep, it was easy for the sinner to convince himself he was okay with God, because nothing bad had happened. Simply repenting of sin and turning with a whole heart to God would require changing their entire worldview. The Law had always pointed to a higher spiritual truth, something they denied.
Finally, He uses the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree to illustrate how God had just about had enough (13:6-9). Three years was plenty of time for a fig tree to mature enough to produce fruit. This one was worthless. The trusted servant interceded for just one more chance. God’s patience was far beyond reason. Thus, Jesus warned often how God was about to chop down the tree of the Nation of Israel once and for all (Luke 3:8-9).
Jesus came to earth to provide, in part, one last opportunity for the Jews to finally get it, to grasp the original intent of all the previous covenants. With all His might, Jesus tried to break up the hardened soil of traditions of men, and fertilize it with the true teaching of the Word of God. God waited another 35-40 years after Jesus paid that awful price in blood, then destroyed the nation for good. If these, His very Own People, could meet such a fate for rejecting His Son, how much more those of us not born His People?

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The Haggai Moment

Posted on November 8, 2012 by ehurst

For context, see my recent post on Haggai.

I’m having a Haggai moment here, where the prophetic word from God is fairly concrete, not so esoteric and symbolic. Granted, our nation has no peculiar covenant with God, but stands with all the others under the Law of Noah. That’s a pretty flexible standard, and God seems to offer a sliding scale of compliance. That is, He grants a generous measure of blessings despite our failure to get any part of it very close to His ideal. I’m not going to nit-pick over the details here; America is missing the whole point entirely.

You say you want security and reasonable material progress? You can’t have it on your terms. God will give nations just enough to hang themselves, but we are past that part of the cycle. We are hanging now. You can only have it and keep it on His terms. Those terms are easily discovered, but our Western Civilization is hostile to the very meaning of His revelation, so we aren’t going to get far simply pretending to read them and paying lip service. Our security is gone; we lie prostrate before our enemies, both mundane and spiritual. Twitching as a dying corpse is not the same as one last struggle to defend. Material progress is a fading dream.

The US, particularly the mainstream Christian institutions, have defined God in terms which prevent anyone actually understanding His revelation. They have defined holiness in ways so alien to God’s Word, I could write books about it, and still not cover the basics. I’m still trying to write those books, right now. They’ll be published by Smashwords.

But beyond that is something very painfully obvious to the poor benighted Western intellect: You can’t get what you want by reaching directly for it. You can only harvest the crop after planting seeds which don’t look anything like that crop. You want good things for your children, but you then shove your children into Satan’s mouth. Don’t expect the Devil won’t start chewing. The path to earthly security and prosperity is a path in the Spirit Realm. If all your efforts are aimed at securing and prospering by your logic and reason, you won’t get there. God has revealed His ways, and they are not optional. So you’ll plant and not harvest; you’ll save and lose it all; you’ll eat not be filled; you’ll hide and not feel safe. That’s because you have avoided God’s loving hand, and insist on His wrath.

At this point, saving the nation is not even possible on any level. It’s dead, Jim. We don’t have Haggai’s option of doing something simple like building a Temple of stone. We have to build a Temple in the Spirit Realm, because that’s where God operates these days. You can only save your own life, and maybe not that. But what can be salvaged is very little, and I’m living proof it’s possible. A limited range of His blessings are still within reach, and I’m harvesting the crop of His mercies because I planted the seeds of obedience. You can’t get by with some vague approach to His Laws any more. The very minimum is sincere and earnest seeking to obey the whole of His Laws. The starting place is to study God’s Laws — not the parody popularized by political mouthpieces calling their Anglo-European heritage “God’s will”, but the Laws He revealed within the intellectual heritage of His People. Of course, given His People also left it all behind, I’m hardly surprised no one else is interested much. Still, this is the path for His long-term blessings and the only way you can hope to protect your kids from the demons.

You see, the biggest threat to your children is not poverty, starvation and social instability. Those are symptoms. The biggest threat to your children is your own rejection of God’s truth and His ways for providing a spiritual power to block out the effects of evil in this world. It’s not like the demonic god Molech, to whom you were required to sacrifice your children literally. But if you don’t let Jehovah hold them in His arms alive and lovingly, He won’t protect them from the demons like Molech.

I’m not the gate keeper, and you can easily ignore me and take the path you discern on your own. But as long as you cling to the modern Western lifestyle and intellectual assumptions, the more your misery will rise to overwhelm you and everyone near and dear.

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Soul Seeds: The Vast Gulf Between

Posted on November 8, 2012 by ehurst

Peter tells us we are required to be ready at any time to explain something of our faith to others (1 Peter 3:15). Those who attend various educational institutions, seeking to obey that command as a vocation, have learned there is a fancy term for the study of those things which make it possible to answer when folks try to poke holes in our faith: apologetics. It’s not so much we apologize in the modern sense of the word for holding to ideas others find offensive (though the Political Correctness crowd would like us to do just that), but we have a ready answer for their objections to our faith.
One of my favorite teachers of apologetics is dead now, but he wrote an awful lot of books and such: Cornelius van Til. The one thing for which he is most famous among Christian scholars is the idea we have no common frame of reference with non-Christians. He talks about theories of how people come to know things — “epistemology” — how the human mind builds its internal structure for holding knowledge, and the mechanism for learning new knowledge. In an essay titled “My Credo” he says:

[A]ny non-Christian epistemology, i.e., any theory of knowledge based upon principles acceptable per se to the “mind of the flesh” … is doomed to utter failure; not only failure as an avenue to Christian faith, but as an avenue to any form of knowledge whatsoever….
To look for a point of contact with the unbeliever in the unbeliever’s notions of himself and his world is to encourage him in his wicked rebellion and to establish him in his self-frustration….
Why seek truth where only a lie is to be found? Can the non-Christian tell us, and therefore the Christ himself, what the facts are and how they are related to each other, in what way they cohere, while yet excluding creation and providence? If he can, and if he can tell us truly, then the Christian story simply is not true!

He connects this to Paul’s contention the sinner’s mind cannot accept the truth of God on its own terms (Romans 8:5-8). Remember: Paul did not come to Christ as a volunteer seeking truth, but was vanquished by the Holy Spirit while seeking to destroy the Church. Prior to the Damascus Road revelation, Paul simply could not accept what Jesus taught (Acts 9:1-9).
One of the things Jesus taught:

“I came to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how distressed I am till it is accomplished!
“Do you suppose that I came to give peace on earth? I tell you, not at all, but rather division. For from now on five in one house will be divided; three against two, and two against three. Father will be divided against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” (Luke 12:49-53)

Jesus knew there would be plenty of listeners who would reject His message. When someone claims to speak for God, they claim to reveal reality as God sees it. Since God is the Creator of all things, we can be certain His point of view is Ultimate Truth. Jesus proclaimed a way of looking at things contrary to what most Jews had taught or had been taught. Some would listen; some would not. The things He spoke about were eternal issues. By their very nature, these issues were all-or-nothing — either He was wholly right or completely wrong. One either agreed with Him or was opposing Him (Luke 11:23).
The message of the gospel of Jesus Christ is full of audacious and unreasonable claims. It starts with the assertion we are all evil by nature and deserve a short miserable life, a long painful death, followed by eternity in Hell. Then He claims to be the only escape from that fate, regardless of where and when one was born. He lived a sinless life, died in our place, and has risen from the dead. Now He lives in each of our hearts, if we accept His teachings. These claims are ludicrous from the standpoint of human logic.
Most humans living at any time since Jesus’ days on earth have predictably rejected these claims. Unless you live a sheltered existence, most people you know will also reject them. Plenty will claim to accept portions of them, or try to find parallels in their own beliefs as grounds for some sort of kinship in spirit, but that is not possible. God says, “This is true,” and anything but “this” is a lie and is sin.
This kind of exclusionary claim raises people’s hackles. It makes folks treat us as enemies. It polarizes everyone and everything, no middle ground. This is the fire Jesus spoke of and the fire consumed His life in a baptism of suffering. He came to bring peace between God and man, not between man and man. You don’t have to be confrontational and harsh to make enemies. Just love people the way Jesus loves them: enough to tell them the truth.
That same fire Jesus brought is a fire which cleanses souls from sin, a fire which gives new life, a fire which burns within to express His truth in how we live and speak. Do you stoke that fire, or do you quench it?

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Ancient Truth: Intro to Matthew

Posted on November 7, 2012 by ehurst

I completely rewrote the introduction to Matthew’s Gospel:
By tradition, Matthew was a cousin of Jesus – their fathers were brothers. Also known by the name Levi, this fellow was employed in collecting King Herod’s taxes. There is a lot of popular mythology about this profession. During this time, the Sanhedrin controlled direct tax collections in Judea, while Galilee was under a tax-farming system. Matthew collected taxes for the nominally Jewish king in Jerusalem, but it meant handling money with pagan images and social mixing with Gentiles, violating many of the legalistic traditions of common religious orthodoxy. Not quite the traitor, as those who collected taxes directly for Rome were commonly viewed, he was still a social outcast because the whole business was considered immoral. Even if Matthew were utterly scrupulous and fair, as John the Baptist had preached, Matthew was despised by society. Jesus included him partly for this very reason, showing His rejection of common views on social morality.
An even better reason was Matthew’s training and education. He would have been at the least literate in Greek, and likely Latin. He would be familiar with the various dialects of Syrian and Persian travelers. He was a superb record keeper, with a highly organized mind, using the common shorthand writing of those in his profession. He would have understood completely the nit-picking legalism of the Jewish government, and could easily keep track of Jesus’ teachings as contrary to that legalism. Permitted no stake in the prevailing system of his day, Matthew’s mind would have been quite receptive to his cousin’s alternative approach to seeking God’s favor. In the end, he was a very Hebraic writer, and his Gospel shows it. A primary focus of his writing was Jesus’ declarations about His kingdom.
The primary target of this Gospel was Jewish Christians who needed to see Jesus was most certainly a fulfillment of the Messianic prophecies, if not a fulfillment of the common political aspirations many Jews had for the promised Messiah. Matthew took pains to collect the teachings of his Lord into themes. Since he seems to have copied so much of Mark’s Gospel, finding no fault with the narrative of events, we sense Matthew wrote his much longer version afterward; we date Mark around 50 AD. It seems painfully obvious Matthew thought in Hebrew, not merely the language but in the entire structure of thought itself. Hebrew was a supremely verbal language, and writing it down was a sort of translation in itself, never mind recording it in yet another language such as Greek. Apparently Matthew was quite up to the task.
I’m working my way through each chapter lesson and enjoying myself immensely. I found a few factual errors and corrected those, and changed my view somewhat at a few points, but mostly it’s passing through with only grammar and spelling corrections. But it’s slow going, and I got as far as chapter 10 today.

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