HTCG 01d

Posted on September 7, 2024 by ehurst

We continue with Chapter 1.

Section C: Non-being

Part 1: In Greek Thought

In order to logically corner the Sophists, Plato sought to define being further by defining non-being. It’s not simply the negation of being; it includes things merely imagined but not real. Thus, a broader definition is that non-being is defined as anything except being. Just as darkness is simply the absence of light, non-being is defined by what it is not. It is not being.

Part 2: In Hebrew Thought

We’ve already seen that finding matching terms and thoughts in the Hebrew is tricky.

Boman finds parallels to being versus non-being in the Hebrew concept of “word” — dabhar. Typical of Hebrew fuzzy logic, that includes deeds and concrete objects that result from the word. There is a Hebrew concept of “not-being” — lo-dabhar. Rather than being a null set, it is rather something opposing life, and sinister. Vain words (i.e., lip-service) are a threat.

That’s because they are inherently deceptive. A false word may well be deceptive or even seductive, but is not simply absent; it is vanity. It provides none of the blessings it promises. It is futility, identified by the pain it causes when you trust in it. Boman offers several Hebrew words that carry similar connotations with different flavors: hebhel (puff of wind), sometimes combined with tohu to signify futility. You’ll also see combinations with shaw or bohu. There is the broad image of ineffectiveness of these vanities.

It is not quite like the western notion of chaos, because for us chaos is something very real and effective. For the Hebrew mind, it is just senseless fluff. Boman tries to bring this together with Plato’s definitions, but it doesn’t work too well. For the Hebrew, things are personal in the sense of relational. It’s always a matter of the role a thing plays, as if all things were alive.

Then he chases a rather useful tangent about Buddhism and it’s “yin-yang” outlook that negation and non-being is a positive thing in the balance of reality. Thus, the Greek and Hebrew are actually much closer to each other by comparison, in seeming to agree on the surface, at least, the non-being is inherently bad.

We’ll break here because the next section is quite long.

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HTCG 01c

Posted on September 6, 2024 by ehurst

We continue with Chapter 1, section A.

Part 5: The Dynamic Character of the World

Here I am compelled to reflect upon rather than interpret what Boman says. He points out that a major reason the Hebrews consider the earth so dynamic is that God made it and can change it dramatically at His whim. It’s substance and structure depends wholly and by the moment upon God holding it all together. This has always been a major difference between the ANE versus the West. The latter places a great trust in what they can perceive and use, and mountains look pretty solid in the flesh. Western minds put an awful lot of faith in such things. In the Hebrew mind, the confidence is in the God who made them.

Section B: Static Being

Part 1: The Eleatics and Heraclitus

The Greek philosophers focused on questions of being versus non-being. Rather than dig too deeply into the history of this, Boman selects the big three representatives: Eleatics, Heraclitus and Plato. If we consider the Hebrew image of being as a matter of dynamism, the Eleatics are emphatically the opposite. If it moves and changes, it’s not real for them. Only what is static is real.

Heraclitus was less dogmatic, and indeed, an outlier among Greek philosophers. He’s the one who gave us, “No man steps in the same stream twice.” It’s quite the dynamism. And it is readily apparent that the Greek language was not formed to carry across the ideas of Heraclitus. Even Plato said (in the mouth of Socrates) that this was a major problem for that school of philosophy.

Then again, Heraclitus was from Ephesus, where the ancient cultural background is distinctly more eastern than western. Plato despaired of being able to discuss this philosophy very much. It’s not that Heraclitus didn’t grasp the nature of Greek epistemology; he sees the issues from a Greek frame of reference. He did embrace the Greek rejection of Creation and a sense of purpose in history. However, it was almost as if he abused Greek language to push it into a different shape.

Part 2: Plato

Between those two extremes stood Plato himself. Oddly, Boman shows his own western bias in suggesting, of all things, that Plato is closer to the Bible than most other Greek philosophers. He sees Plato as fundamentally religious in his approach. I frankly chuckled when Boman opined that the early church scholars were mostly Platonic, and that their descent into the Dark Ages coincided with the rise of Aristotelian influence. He’s right, of course, about how quickly the early church abandoned the Hebrew thought for Plato, but the huge difference is that I don’t approve, while Boman rejoices.

He somehow avoids common academic talk about Plato, finding other ways to tell us that it’s all about the real versus the ideal. The real is transitory; things pass away, as our senses tell us. However, once you engage reason and logic, you arrive at ideals that can stand forever. This is “spiritual” and “eternal” for Plato. There’s a further distinction between math as the lower level (mere facts), and a higher level of ideas that reflect something of the nature of truth itself.

Moreover, reality is not the source. Rather, truth or ideas are the “spiritual” reality on which factual reality depends. God is not a living person, but the combined goodness of static ideas. Boman tries to keep God existing in this philosophy, but it doesn’t work. At any rate, it’s the old “what is true, good and beautiful” displaces God. On a sliding scale, whatever is more good-true-beautiful is also more trustworthy. Boman tries again to convince his readers that a synthesis is possible between Hebrew and Greek via Plato. I’m not buying it.

Side note: As clearly as I can recall, all the way back to the first stirrings of my academic studies back in the 1970s, and reading materials going back as far as the Second Temple literature, I cannot recall a single professor or scholar who didn’t prefer some flavor of western epistemology over the Hebrew. It’s bad enough that only a few of them actually understood the Hebrew approach, but not a single one of them favored it.

It seems to me this is fundamental to fallen human nature. It goes all the way back to the Jewish rabbis. The moment they were exposed to Greek philosophy, it seized their human pride and they couldn’t seem to shake the monkey off their backs. I honestly have not run across anyone who has published a preference for the Hebrew epistemology. It’s been pretty lonely.

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HTCG 01b

Posted on September 5, 2024 by ehurst

We continue with Chapter 1, section A.

Part 3: Logical “Being” in Hebrew

Boman had previously mentioned the Hebrew noun clause that was often used in a place where we expect some kind of verb “to be”. The noun clause does a better job of portraying what exists than our western languages do with inactive verbs. In this part he drags readers off into a technical grammar discussion comparing western grammar with Hebrew, using all the obscure parts of speech terminology.

At any rate, Hebrew language won’t often bother with stating “X is Y” to indicate that one is the material or substance of the other (the predicate), but simply places the two terms together in such a way as to indicate something about the matter at hand. Boman doesn’t immediately discuss the way Hebrew is inherently symbolic first and foremost, painting an image with terms that have deep symbolism.

What he does point out is that western grammar follows the logic of wanting to consider first the form of the thing, and then the material, with those two things being separate considerations. For the Semites, the material is what matters most, because it determines the form. It would be entirely inappropriate, for example, to have an altar of wood shaped anything like an altar of stone. Common elements, yes, but the choice of one material or the other changes the shape and basic purpose. They cannot be used the same way. Separating the form and substance is simply not possible. The very meaning of the subject includes the materials. Do you notice how we can scarcely even describe the Hebrew manner of thinking in English?

It gets worse with a related noun clause form, consisting of tying to the subject a list of attributes that clarify, but still presumes a possession or sense of belonging between the noun and the predicates. Variations on the verb “to be” would be implied from our western perspective, but are not declared in the Hebrew because it misses the point in their thinking.

Part 4: The “Being” of the Verb hayah

At first glance, you would think the verb hayah is the missing “to be” we want to find in Hebrew. It’s complicated very quickly, and you may struggle to follow the discussion without familiarity with linguistics and the broad culture and civilization of the Ancient Near East. For now, think in terms of to be, to become, to produce an effect. Be warned that even this much is still rooted in our western psychological biases.

Boman cites four different ideas that we would distinguish, but which are all inherent in the how the word is used — (1) becoming in the sense of something passing from one condition to another; (2) becoming in a symbolic sense, a change in moral quality; (3) becoming in the sense of a vocation learned by someone; (4) becoming in the sense of changing the effects of the subject. The parenthetical translations that follow are simply approximations.

He then lists the way the thrust of the term hayah varies in the context of different prepositions. With hayah le (become something) the same four concepts in the previous paragraph become more intense, if you will — most emphatically not static — and the most common emphasis is the matter of effects. It’s inherent in the phrase itself.

For hayah ke (become like), it carries the connotation of becoming like something else, of appearing or serving as the other thing — as though. Again, it carries more drama than a simple statement of fact, particularly when used in the negative. If we find in a text hayah `al (being at) we find the implication of something heading toward the indicated condition, as in “It will be thus when it gets here.” It also portrays something will “act upon” another thing, all the more so if in response to an authoritative command. Yet again, there is seldom a precise translation possible.

With hayah be (being in) the emphasis is filled with personhood, most often referring to people. Even when used of ostensibly inanimate objects, it implies something with power and potential greater than normal. Boman notes that none of these prepositions changes the underlying meaning of hayah, but simply refines it. The same could be said of several more prepositions he lists but does not explain in detail.

While standard English translations often consider hayah as some form of “to be”, it rarely means that in any given context. For example, in Isaiah 51:6, God’s salvation doesn’t just exist in stasis, but shall endure rather like a living thing in itself. It will be there covering and prospering you dynamically in response to everything that comes your way. That’s all in hayah.

In conjunction with statements about time, hayah often portrays that what is now is quite different from what was at some time before. The world in Genesis 1 was previously chaotic and unformed; Nineveh was once a great city; Joseph was already in Egypt ahead of his brothers. In other contexts, it is purely stylistic as part of a formulary statement (like the genealogical tables). When you find hayah used in a comment about someone being fair or beautiful, it is meant to convey far more than just a pretty face. It’s someone who has a lot of charisma.

It goes on like this for several more pages. If you pair hayah with participle, it renders as a come-n-go repetition, but a passive participle shifts to an image of duration. In dependent clauses it means the thing will come to pass. It is not merely a subjective perception, though. It’s very real to the Hebrew mind, but lacks the nit-picking definition and distinctions of western thinking. In Hebrew thinking, the whole universe is alive and dynamic, and you must strive to keep finding your place in it.

For context where hayah refers to God, it’s nothing new on this blog. Boman affirms over several pages the basic teaching here that all you can say about God is what He requires of you. You are surely expected to know Him as a person, but He transcends even the symbolic statements about Him. Factual assertions about God have no meaning. It’s an ongoing story of interaction with Him and how He changes us.

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HTCG 01a

Posted on September 4, 2024 by ehurst

Note: Each chapter of the book is outlined into sections, which are in turn outlined in smaller parts.

Chapter 1: Dynamic and Static Thinking — Again, the issue stands on how any separation between thinking and language is artificial. There are a whole class of so-called Bible translators who know the mechanics of translation as taught, but who never quite get inside the head of those who used that language. This is why some translations into English are so bad, and yet so very few people even begin to understand that such translations are bad. New Testament translation should be a breeze, right? Not if you can’t grasp the Hebrew minds of most of the writers.

Section A: Dynamic Thinking

Part 1: The Dynamic Character of Hebrew Verbs of Inaction

The primary purpose of Hebrew writing was to inspire, not to inform. Thus, Boman notes that Hebrew thinking is characterized as “dynamic, vigorous, passionate and sometimes explosive” while the Greek was “static, peaceful, moderate and harmonious”. In this case, the stasis is not simply “rigid, inflexible and lifeless”, but also “prudent, moderate and peaceful”. Viewed from the Greek perspective, Hebrew thinking is “exaggerated, immoderate, discordant and in bad taste” (all quotes from page 27). The author prefers to make the two different without making them enemies.

As a rule, Hebrew verbs are all inherently dynamic, yet can be used to express images of passivity. Boman launches into a list of verbs which can all be translated as “stand”. All of them have a fundamentally active meaning of how one arrives at a standing position, though some point more to taking up a dwelling. His point is that what strikes us as passive in English is imbued with dynamism in Hebrew — actively pushing against resistance (if only internal entropy) in order to hold a spot. Because of our internal psychological frame of reference, Hebrew words can be ambiguous, portraying opposite ideas in the same word — stand versus sit. In Hebrew, those two concepts are closely connected.

In a footnote, Boman notes that Arabic scholars even have a word for how common this is in Semitic languages in general — addad. For example, life and death are linked in that “death is the weakest form of life.” (p. 29) Then he says something very critical to understanding Hebrew: Those who live with the Hebrew language would not differentiate between a word spoken and its effects. That is, the concept of “word” is itself equated with the will and intent of the speaker. Words and actions are generally not distinguished.

And it’s not just people. In a very roundabout fashion, Boman points out that even inanimate objects are spoken of as having taken an action, using the various words for “stand” cited from several passages. Even a city “standing” takes on the connotation of being inhabited, as if the city itself chose this. In Hebrew, “dwelling” means a person dwells actively (as in “occupying, using”), while in Greek minds the whole point is the facility and normal contents that come with active use.

Part 2: The Dynamic Character of Hebrew Verbs of Condition and of Quality

Such verbs in Greek (and English) portray a state of being. In Semitic languages, translators commonly use them to convey an active becoming. However, even that often fails to capture the Hebrew emphasis of getting work done. Boman refers to “lighten” as more than brightness or even becoming bright; it means the work of illumination — the effect of lighten.

He offers another collection of Hebrew verbs often translated “lighten/brighten” followed by a very technical discussion of Hebrew verb forms and how to recognize them. His point is that a great many experts have struggled to find ways to discuss these things (transitive versus intransitive verbs) in their western languages and there is no solid consensus on how to portray the subtle distinctions between types of verbs, distinctions we consider essential, but which apparently don’t seem important from a Hebrew point of view.

I’ve read plenty of such analysis, and have often wondered if they aren’t all missing some bigger point: The Semitic languages developed before such concepts were even available in that part of the world. The whole discussion may well be artificial and pointless. Boman seems to come to that conclusion eventually. It’s not a question of being or becoming, but of the intention from within the subject of such verbs. For us, the anthropomorphism of inanimate objects is just a figure of speech; for the Hebrews, it is the essence of reality itself. Without meaning to, Boman comes out in support of our teaching that the Hebrew people seemed to act as if all of reality was living, sentient and willful.

Tangent: For all those who claim that the reading and understanding the Bible should not require graduate level training in Biblical Studies, your arrogance is showing. Translating Hebrew thinking into English is extremely difficult, and the results are numerous different translations, all of which clearly miss the point in one way or another. Such a contention is dismissive of the radical difference in psychology between the people in the Bible and western folks today. The reason you can’t instantly get the whole gospel message from your favorite English translation is because you are unwilling to surrender the two millennia of cultural corruption that made our world so alien to God’s revelation.

Yes, you can probably meet Jesus in just about any English Bible translation, but you will not be able to walk in His Covenant and bring Him due glory without that vast depth of knowledge. That was the reason He died on the Cross. You may be content to just step inside the gate and camp out there; we want to accept God’s invitation to wander the Garden of Eden at His side.

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HTCG Introduction

Posted on September 2, 2024 by ehurst

It’s this blog’s turn to review a book: Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek by Thorleif Boman (HTCG). The book was published first in German back in 1954; this is the second edition translated into English around 1960. The copy I’m using is a later release from Norton paperbacks, available on Amazon or other online booksellers. Some of you may struggle to follow this highly philosophical discussion. The underlying premise is that you cannot separate language and thought.

This book dives deep on the first page; it is not a light read. There are critical explanations from the very first words of the introduction. One of the first things you learn is that, among Hebrew intelligentsia familiar with Greece and Hellenism, they regarded themselves as anti-Hellenists by predisposition. A footnote explains that, in their rejection of Hellenism, the Hebrews didn’t feel the need to worry about the form of things, nor to harmonize with the natural world, but to remain focused on the moral reality of everything. Thus, they produced no visual art simply because the Second Commandment to avoid idolatrous images.

European theologians very early became aware of the inherent contradiction between Jesus’ Hebrew mindset and the early church doctrines so deeply rooted in Hellenistic thinking. A major difficulty for us is the very uneven scholarship which addressed this conflict. There was no consensus in European scholarship about this question.

Boman is honest enough to admit his bias in favor of seeing the Greek influence as not a such a big problem as I do. He states that, in regards the question of Greek influence on the gospel message, Plato is the pinnacle of Hellenism — the idealist proposition (Allegory of the Cave). If there’s a problem, he believes rests on Platonism. I agree that taking away Plato will not mean the gospel prevails, but only because I think that misses the point.

Boman goes on to note that Platonism was a much bigger influence in English church history than was the case in Germany. In his mind, Plato is about what exists, while German idealism is about training the mind to consider what ought to be. Thus, while Catholicism (Thomism) was Aristotelian, the Reformation was Platonic idealism. Both tend to nail things down statically from different approaches. Meanwhile, Hebrew is more aimed at tracking the Divine Person of God, a dynamic prospect.

In that sense, Hebrew thinking is more temporal (timely) versus the Hellenistic mind seeking permanence. There’s an odd quality of “eternity” as time rolling on forever in the Greek mind, versus Eternity as unknowable and incomprehensible to humans in Hebrew.

So, the question of how the gospel message was influenced by casting it in Greek intellectual assumptions is a very hard one. Most previous scholarship has been notably one-sided, preferring the net result of Hellenism in how it formed western Christian religion. It is exceedingly difficult to get inside the Hebrew mind from a western position. The task is so large that the author confines himself to Platonism versus Hebrew outlook.

Thus, while the Hebrew mind considers the power and authority of the Creator, the Platonist looks at what kind of Person the Creator is shown to be by Creation. The latter is a very human question. This is quite natural for a man-centered epistemology; all things are measured by man. What can we make of this? Hebrews would instinctively think to ask what this requires of them; not an intellectual exercise, but a moral one.

Boman notes that previous approaches to this whole question have often labeled the Hebrew mind as primitive, while the Greek is more highly developed. Thus, they compared the Hebrews to any number of other primitive cultures instead of trying to give the Hebrew credit for simply being different from Greeks.

I take a moment to note that Boman seems to have embraced the JEPD Documentation Hypothesis, now long discredited. This is where his own bias peeks through at us, because it is a purely western superiority that proposed the JEPD Theory in the first place. I can recall college professors who seemed to believe God built the West. “Doesn’t Hellenism come from God? Surely God could not have really been that primitive Himself?”

If you track the intellectual development of the Hebrews, even from Scripture alone, you will see that the cultural and intellectual drift of Hebrew leadership away from “primitive” Hebrew to more cosmopolitan and developed thinking is highly correlated with God’s very clear growing displeasure with them.

At any rate, Boman describes a very deep lack of academic interest in the whole question of just how it is that Hebrew is truly different from Greek thinking. The true experts in such a study seem to have no interest. The comparison of the biblical narrative with Homer’s epics is missing the point. This is not a simple literature question; the Hebrew purpose in literature is altogether different in the first place. Too many scholars are working too hard at collating Hebrew and Greek thinking, and too from from a Hellenistic bias. Even a great many Hebrew scholars seem to write from a western mind.

Boman goes into a long discussion of these scholars by name, and it’s not likely any us would recognize them. I spotted W.F. Albright, the founding father of biblical archaeology as we know it today, mentioned for his expertise in Ancient Near Eastern languages. Too many of the scholars approached Hebrew with all of their western presuppositions, and so completely missed the fundamental differences. He also notes that on the one hand, a knowledge of the other Semitic cultures is essential, we still need to be aware of how the Hebrews struggled so hard to distinguish themselves from them.

We shall see if Boman is able to step outside his own biases for a task that precious few have even bothered to approach.

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NT Doctrine — Hebrews 4

Posted on August 31, 2024 by ehurst

Israel as a nation did not enter into God’s rest (in Hebrew related to the word “Sabbath”). Never mind the Talmudic perversion, the Law of Moses itself could not grant that divine rest; it could only point out that such peace existed. Under Moses, peace with God was a matter of feudal submission to Him. Now that same submission and peace are found in Christ. This is what Moses and David both foresaw.

The writer pleads with them not to come up short of that peace. The nation in the wilderness did not listen to the good news of peace, did not yield to God’s sovereignty. It’s all connected to the Sabbath of Creation, but the nation of Israel rejected it. A whole generation died in the wilderness without seeing it. But that rest didn’t simply cease to exist; the door was still open. While Joshua brought them into the Land, they still didn’t find that rest, still would not fully obey. This is why David, several centuries later, was still calling prophetically for the nation to submit to God, quoting that passage where God swore that generation would die in the wilderness.

Don’t go back out into the wilderness, says the writer. Again, that Sabbath rest was not in the Law, but was indicated by it. When you enter the Christ’s rest, you are no longer under that Law, but under Him. You are joining God who rested after His works of Creation. Returning to the Law means you didn’t find the Sabbath rest of faith. The constraints of the Law were for those who had no faith.

The Word of God — Christ, the Living Word — is sharper than a sword. Like a butcher knife it can cut cleanly between bone and flesh. Just so, the Word can discern the commitments of your heart; He knows your most intimate secrets, the ones you keep from yourself. No High Priest in Jerusalem can minister to you like Jesus. Our Savior came down from Heaven, yet walked in our flesh, fully knowing everything we face.

Cling to the message of Christ and come boldly into the Father’s Presence. Everything we need to face the troubles of this life He will supply.

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Telling the Story Again, Part 5

Posted on August 30, 2024 by ehurst

As a sort of coda, I need to add one more warning: Libertarian theory is heavily influenced by Jews, as well. Bits and pieces of it work okay, but the current teaching is deeply Jewish. That is, it’s what Jews want westerners to do if they can’t be herded into globalism or Zionism. Jews hate westerners and Christians. While they tend to lump that all together, there will come a time when they will recognize and target genuine covenant believers. Until, their whole game is destroying whites. Libertarian theory uses some of the worst impulses of white western culture.

Currently, a major element of the libertarian agenda is open borders and individualism. They promote ignoring race, which means they promote only whites doing so. All other races are encouraged to be racist and supremacist. Libertarian theory promotes removing all economic restrictions, which means that covenant shepherds are not allowed to protect their domains from economic rape. That rape inevitably means being open to Jewish economic sabotage and plunder. And on and on it goes. It all serves only one purpose: to weaken the West for a Jewish takeover. They are Satan’s Chosen now, not God’s.

They want us to forget Election, a biblical doctrine. It does not make sense on a human level, but it makes sense to God. He has His Elect, and then there are some other folks in the mix while we live in this fallen realm.

What is the most redemptive thing we can do for the non-elect? Is there a clear mindset that we can adopt that answers the mission of Christ for those who will never be among the Chosen? On the one hand, it’s obvious that we should pretend everyone we encounter could turn out to be Elect. We should maintain that same basic appeal that can only be recognized by those with a spiritual awakening. At the same time, there is Biblical Law for those who struggle with the Holy Spirit.

It’s not as if we have nothing to offer those who have only this life. That was the whole point of a covenant law code that the brain can grasp without spiritual awareness. Remember, the heart can function in moral awareness without the Spirit of God. It’s the one gift God gave all humanity, the Law and a heart to obey it. We might struggle to sell that idea to those who live in the flesh, but it’s the best we have for them.

Right off the bat, we must remind everyone that God’s Law is inherently tribal, among other things. Jews are slowly succeeding at shredding the West and white people using the evil magic of demons to prevail. It’s a magic of binding minds in darkness. The best antidote to this is simply stating the truth about Jews, and about whites while we are at it. Whites who aren’t chosen for eternity need to know that God has provided them with a collective interest.

Jews have provoked all the non-whites to poke at whites; this isn’t something native to any non-white culture. It’s hatred they were taught as a social weapon, same as racist whites wielded. They are all serving the Jewish agenda without realizing how it destroys them at the same time. They all need to cling to the very same sense of ethnic identity that Jews want to keep only for themselves. None of them have the Holy Spirit to give them the more powerful spiritual identity. Race is all that’s left to them, and it is required for them to live in this fallen world.

All the false substitutes for white ethnic identity were designed to degrade the one thing that gave whites the capability to resist Jewish takeover. Whites should have the same advantage as everyone else, but not greater. God knows that human warfare cannot be ended, ever. That’s why God’s Law makes so much of how to do war, not demanding that it end. In Christ there’s no place for that, but outside of Christ, it’s a dire necessity. The law code is all they have to bless their lives.

This was part of the lesson at the Tower of Babel. God will simply not allow humans to unify under a multi-racial central government. Thus, all empires will end in destruction. Decentralization is His will, period. The best humans can hope for, outside of Christ, is to build a tribal identity from the flesh. No, we don’t encourage racial strife. We do encourage racial identity. We fully expect strife to come for any number of reasons; we seek only to keep it within the boundaries of covenant law code. Racial harmony for flesh requires not mixing.

The issue here is standing up for God’s revelation. That business of “blessed are the peacemakers” refers to making peace with God. That’s what Jesus meant by it. Peace among humans is utterly impossible without the Holy Spirit. He alone drives us to peace, and it’s largely automatic when He’s present in the soul. In Christ, we know to reach across all human barriers; His Word teaches us how.

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Telling the Story Again, Part 4

Posted on August 29, 2024 by ehurst

Political confusion is part of the wider deception of Satan.

It’s very easy to get confused about how the competing agendas of the globalists, Zionists, neocon, revisionists, and other Jewish political groups serve the broader Jewish agenda while arguing over how to go about it. The confusion is part of the Devil’s game. Jews were never monolithic in any normal sense that we would easily recognize. It’s self-deceiving to talk as if every Jew was on the same sheet of music politically.

The varied political agendas were never the point. All of them are demonic and defiled because all of them reject the Covenant. Any plan of human organization that ignores the Covenant is blasphemous and doomed. But it’s not that all of them are blatantly wicked and evil. Rather, all them are variations on the half-truth theme that keeps humanity in chains. They all have an element that calls out to one human or another, keeping us divided over the wrong things.

Humans must be divided and decentralized, but over the right things. Our differences should reflect a difference in location, climate, ethnic background, inherited traits, etc. We are supposed to be tribal. It’s not that we cannot mix, but that we simply must ditch the lie of cosmopolitan mixing. The simple truth is that some portion of humanity are not Elect and could never possibly live by spiritual principles. You cannot rise above ethnicities without the Holy Spirit. It is not a valid human goal. Without the power of the Spirit, it’s a lie from Hell.

Our problem is that no organized church will ever be restricted to Spirit-led Elect. Any assumption that such a thing could exist is blasphemous. Yet, even if it could exist, there would remain human divisions, and this is not from sin in the individuals themselves. Rather, it is from our situation in a mortal existence. God will not lead us to the kind of unity people imagine as “righteous”. Our unity is spiritual, not fleshly. By no means does the gospel require theological and practical unity. Christ transcends all of that.

When Jesus condemned His disciples for their petty dispute over what positions they would hold in the Messianic Kingdom, it was a problem on multiple levels. First was their obsession with a political outcome, asserting the dominance of the Jewish nation. They should not have even wanted that, since it could only come from Satan. But at the same time, He was castigating them for thinking that their human differences mattered. The whole point of having a child sit on His lap in that one scene was to call for us to focus on the Father so much that we didn’t pay much attention to everyone’s petty ambitions. We should be thrilled at being allowed to come along for the ride.

The whole point of the Covenant Law of love is learning how to live in the disunity that no human or group can overcome. Once we embrace this as normal, right and just in our mortal existence, we learn how to look past such things to fellowship with each other and make the most of what we do have in common. Do you see how the Jewish deception regarding ritual unity turns this on its head? They get a functional unity that ties them to this world. Nothing they have helps them to escape the flesh.

When you stop thinking that political unity is important, then you are in a better position to step back and assess the highly varied political agendas that Jews influence among Gentiles. If globalists think about Jews at all, it’s with some distaste. However, they often ignore the existence of the Jewish agenda and press their own. They’ll take any money and power they can get from any source.

Globalists are under the delusion that Jews don’t really care that much about their own ethnic heritage because all the Jews they deal with pretend they don’t care. We know that Jews would never tolerate uncontrolled mixing with other races, yet Jews have promoted immigration of Third World peoples into the West for centuries.

That’s because Jews hate whites, who are the crux of Western Civilization. All the problems Jews have had taking over the world in recent centuries have been with European nations recognizing the Jewish threat and organizing to stop it. Eventually Jews figured out how to harness the whites to destroy their own heritage by moralistic nagging about things Jews would never tolerate for themselves. Jews insinuated the whole range of Lockean assumptions, leftism, progressive agendas into portions of the West. They sold the image of global government and technocratic efficiency and communism, etc., to westerners. Thus, feminism, wokism, Green religion, socialist control policies, all come from Jews who would hate it for themselves, but love it for us.

But some Jews didn’t like grubbing around in the leftist stuff, so they migrated to the right and seized control, becoming what we call neocons. They still want to destroy America, but they know they have to play down their totally different moral orientation and pretend to be conservative. Remember, Jewish leadership sees nothing wrong with moral depravity of the flesh (it’s part of their ritual magic), so long as they keep the rituals in some legalistic fashion — legalism is the magical power. However, many neocons aren’t very religious in the first place. Many of them are followers of the secretive Leo Strauss; it’s hard to know their agenda except as a function of their visible actions.

Zionists are pretty obvious: It’s all about the State of Israel. But a very large branch of Zionism is called “revisionist” (revising the map) because they want to seize the maximum territory that anyone might have imagined was once controlled by Israel. Their notion of “Greater Israel” is a chunk of Egypt, most of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, maybe Cyprus, etc. These folks appear quite insane with their egregiously fraudulent demands, a rather blatant Jewish supremacy movement.

Some of these folks are in the Israeli government. This is people like Netanyahu who genuinely want to start WW3, and they aren’t the least bit troubled by nuclear war, even if it kills their own people. It seems like a form of madness, but he’s not alone. Zelensky is cast from the same mold. It’s a class of Jewish leadership that is actually secularist, but committed to destroying the West at all costs, while pretending to care about westerners. They are pulling out all stops to drag the West into war. Netanyahu and Zelensky both are carrying a hefty dose of personal criminal corruption. This is still part of the matrix of Jewish identity, and part of how Satan uses them to foment chaos and destruction.

By the way, this is the Jewish leadership who are delighted at the most inhuman torment of prisoners, won’t hesitate to shoot their own citizens to prevent kidnapping, don’t bat an eye at massive slaughter of Gentiles, etc. Do you see the imprint of dark forces in their actions, the unimaginable rage and hatred for humanity? Yet, they are protected by the foul magic of the Nephilim whom they serve.

Killing all of them together would not hinder the forces of Darkness. This a time of deep darkness, even if this isn’t the End Times. The Nephilim have been released by God as agents for a portion of His wrath on sin. The Covenant is your only hope.

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Telling the Story Again, Part 3

Posted on August 28, 2024 by ehurst

The first two parts summarize the foundation of how I understand what Jews are doing today, and the wider political currents.

It’s very easy to miss the point that Israel did have a mandate from God as declared in the Old Testament, but surrendered it in favor of a very shallow self-worship. They rejected the deep and mystical truth for worldly advantage. They rejected the God of revelation and defiled themselves, via their worldly desires. Their religion is very worldly, and they are vehement in rejecting the otherworldly viewpoint. Even the Kabbalism they cooked up turns out to be esoteric worldliness.

Individual Jews range over the whole spectrum from the esoteric nonsense all the way down to simple secularism. Some have walked away from their heritage, among them writers like Ron Unz and Israel Shahak. They are the exceptions that prove the rule: Jews as a whole serve Satan, not the God who made them. I saw quite clearly their adoption by Satan long before I ever knew Heiser existed. This adoption should be obvious to anyone, yet American church religion is dominated by various flavors of Zionism. Experientially, I saw the tail end of the process of Zionism hijacking American churches during my youth. It took me a while to realize what I was seeing, but I rejected the Dispensationalist lie long ago.

Basic truth: Satan will offer anything at all to keep us away from the gospel. That includes an awful lot of half-truth, just enough to sound like the Bible, but leaving out the essence of embracing the Covenant of Christ and testifying effectively for God’s claims.

Notice something about the Wilderness Temptations: Satan offered things he could not give. Not that he couldn’t actually provide some semblance of what he promised, but that none of it mattered. He offered economic plenty and physical comfort, but making that your goal is deadly, no matter what flavor you prefer. He offered political stability, but it would have been artificial and wholly outside of God’s revelation. It was a distraction from the real thing. He also offered to feed our heads while letting our hearts die. We would imagine that we could understand reality, but would be kept far away from Eternity.

Jesus rejected this offer, but the Jewish people accepted it. They swore allegiance to a false covenant offered by Satan. They became his special nation, something God had not given him in the allotment at the Tower of Babel. Their flesh belongs to him; that’s all he got. He uses their worldly presence to keep the rest of mankind in the flesh and away from the privileges of the Covenant of Christ.

The fundamental truth of Jewish identity is their commitment to their tribe and the false covenant. The level and kind of commitment they hold determines the worldly benefit they receive, though it’s far more complicated than the mind can imagine. They don’t all share the same political commitments, but the key to their unity is not political or anything else most outsiders would expect. At the core, their unity is purely a matter of ritual and the dark magic on which it is based. The rituals vaguely resemble those commanded via Moses, but have been perverted in the whole so that they now serve Satan.

Did you imagine that the Talmud was purely a matter of intellect? No, it invokes dark powers. It didn’t start out that way, but it developed over the centuries after the New Testament period. The Nephilim spirits (demons) live among them, when Israel once was the nation God raised up to kill the Nephilim. Jewish experts have confessed that what holds them together is the ritual lifestyle, regardless of any intellectual perception of what the rituals mean. Theology is not the point. They worship side by side under any number of varying illusions, but revel in their ritual unity.

Any lingering Jewish loyalty among those who convert to Christian religion is a mark of that dark power still at work. This is part of the reason we teach that humans must renounce their ethnic identity to become part of the Covenant. It’s one thing to be aware of ethnic background intellectually; it’s another to maintain some allegiance or commitment to those who share our fleshly identity. That is the key Satanic influence that keeps us weak in the Covenant.

Keep in mind: The dark magic defiles and fouls your spiritual life. It’s important to keep track of the signature of the dark power of the Nephilim spirits. It’s of somewhat lesser importance to keep track of who maintains a Jewish identity because of the high probability they will serve Satan’s agenda. Jews will get involved in plenty of things that don’t matter in order to hide their real commitments, but as long as they think of themselves as Jews, there is a defiling presence in all they touch. You need to become sensitive to this according to the gifts and talents God has given you.

The whole point of the gospel message is to seek a spiritual identity that transcends flesh.

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Telling the Story Again, Part 2

Posted on August 27, 2024 by ehurst

Let’s review what we gain from Heiser’s thesis.

As always, it’s not simply his thesis; he brought together a vast body of scholarly work and presented it to church folks who rarely hear anything about it. The huge gulf in scholarship between biblical studies versus divinity studies has been a very big problem for centuries. Church folks never get to hear much from biblical studies, and so anything that bleeds across that solid wall always causes a ruckus. An awful lot of church leaders condemn the biblical studies folks like Heiser when they dare to share their material publicly.

Heiser points out the Three Rebellions. There’s the one in the Garden where the Devil suckers humans into taking sides with him, and thus pulling them under his authority. There is the second rebellion where some of God’s divine staff came down to get more directly involved in human affairs — on Satan’s behalf — and raised up Nephilim. The Nephilim were nasty creatures, sort of demigods who sought to lead humans deeper into a more purposeful rebellion against God. The third rebellion was at the Tower of Babel. God divided the existing nations among the senior staff, which we call the Elohim Council or Divine Council, while He proposed to raise up a nation uniquely His starting from scratch. The council members wasted no time in leading their nations away from divine revelation and into idolatry of themselves.

God raised up Abraham and the line of his firstborn descendants that we call the Nation of Israel. He took them through various experiences, to include the process of revelation at Mount Sinai and the Covenant. God Himself said they were easily the worst people He could have chosen for this mission, but that in itself was part of His argument against Satan and the rebel members of His staff.

At any rate, they quickly perverted His Covenant into self-centered demands. They presumed upon their status as the Chosen and insisted that God had designated them as the only real humans on the planet; all the other nations were just animals that looked like humans. This is a half-truth blown out of proportion, the same kind of mistake Satan made as God’s Chief Bodyguard.

In other words, as a nation, Israel consistently chose the Devil’s agenda over God’s, and kept taking sides with the rebellion. Satan took advantage of his authority, even in its restrictions, and wholly confined himself faithfully to the those restrictions, yet still managed to seduce Israel away from serving God.

God has always kept a faithful remnant within the Hebrew peoples. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. If God had not intervened, the gospel we have today would have remained invisible. The gospel has always been present in the written record of God’s revelation, but has often been missed because it demands humans transcend their mortality. The gospel requires undoing the Fall, and we cannot do it on our own.

This is why the Bible talks about divine election, that God must initiate the redemption process, because humans are incapable of even wanting it, much less understanding it. What makes election so hard to understand is that it’s a divine moral truth that exceeds the constraints of time and space. It includes factors of human choice, yet rests entirely on God’s initiative and authority. It’s the ultimate paradox. The whole point is our dependence on God; Satan wants us to believe in our independence from God.

God decided that, at some point in the process of Israel being hijacked by the Devil, He should intervene to make the gospel as clear as possible without violating His own nature and while keeping to the original purpose of the Covenant. The Covenant offers only so much — it reverses the Fall. Neither the Fall nor the Covenant can change our eternal nature; they are external to Eternity in a certain sense. Nothing in this world can change Eternity. Eternity shapes this world; it’s one way.

God was determined to have a people who lived by His revelation, people who would worship Him alone, in part to prove His point about glory belonging to Him alone. He was not going to do without a people to testify on His behalf. However, He kept secret from Satan and his allies just how He planned to do that. On the one hand, He clearly revealed through prophesies that His covenant would be opened to all humanity, not just Israel. On the other hand, He kept secret His claim on a large portion of humanity as His Elect before all of this drama got started.

His plan was to insert into all nations a body of people who were Elect, who would defy the rebellion and keep the witness of God’s justice alive on the earth. That body of Elect were within Israel, too. While the rebellion focused on seducing nations, God focused on saving individuals to form an empire that ignored human identities. Thus, when Christ died to end the national covenant of Israel, He opened a spiritual covenant to all the Elect hidden throughout the nations.

Heiser notes that a part of the Wilderness Temptations was Satan trying to get Jesus to reveal this secret. Satan could smell something was up, but was ignorant of how it would work. So, he tried to persuade Jesus to keep the old covenant alive and cater to the worldly desires of the Jews. That failed, but it still wasn’t clear to him what God was planning to do.

This is all noted in the New Testament, but most people miss it. They keep reading their human reasoning back into the Scripture. God sprung His surprise on the whole divine staff; Satan and his allies are left scrambling to keep their claim on humanity as deserving oblivion. Their case rests on some things we cannot comprehend, but part of it is keeping people blind to what God is all about.

Don’t get lost chasing the wrong issues. The question is not our place in Eternity; it’s not about what we can or cannot do to be a part of Eternity. The Doctrine of Election is not about us; it’s about God and His agenda. The question for us is what we can do to stay at peace with God, taking His side in the dispute here and now, which means being at war with Satan and his allies.

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