Progress Not the Goal

Posted on July 8, 2012 by ehurst

The Kingdom is not about progress or numerical growth, or any of the other logical standards of achievement. The Kingdom is about purity and fidelity.
The Calvinists have at least one thing correct, because it’s bluntly stated by Apostle Paul in Romans: We do not save ourselves. We have zero input, no part in it except as passive recipients. Eternity makes its own choices as to whom it admits. Nothing any human can do has any effect on the choice. It is utterly and relentlessly the initiative of God alone. We aren’t supposed to understand it, and this is where the Calvinists and the Reformed get it all wrong. Any attempt to make it logical and reasonable only corrupts the truth. Any attempt to draw logical conclusions is at best not very useful.
We who understand ourselves as being spiritually alive, born from above, are not passive in the sense of having no input once we are on the other side of that eternal boundary. It’s a paradox. When we most need input, we have none. Once we belong, our input is required. From then on, a significant element in our human suffering is our failure to perform our eternal duties. This implies our suffering as Christians is greater than the suffering of those who are not Christian. It’s true, and you have no choice in the matter, as far as that goes. Your only choice is to embrace it in whatever measure you can and will.
It’s all very fuzzy and illogical, loaded with paradox from beginning to end.
You would think numerical growth was a sign of God’s favor, but so is persecution. Growth in the face of oppression and opposition is the key, not growth alone. Simple numerical growth means nothing, especially when opposition is limited. Indeed, it implies a failure to understand. It’s not so much we need to raise our institutional/organizational barriers so high, as we need to recognize numerical growth is not in itself meaningful. The proper barriers are in the nature of the demands of following Christ, and we should be loathe to raise any barriers artificially in how we build our fellowships and associations.
We should never pretend anything we can grasp with our minds is settled and eternal, because this entire universe is unsettled and transitory. We cannot design a human process capable of discerning whether someone is “in” or “out” of the Kingdom. We should stop pretending we could know for anyone except that person in the mirror. We should realize before we ever start our membership list means nothing in the Kingdom. This is why I discourage every element in modern church organizational structure, because it all misses the point.
First, you don’t decide in your mind who is in our out, except in terms of the current context. It’s always rightly perceived as fleeting and ephemeral. For this moment, you and I share something eternal, so far as either of us can tell, and later it may not be so. Nor should we allow our feelings of warmth and acceptance to depend on that sense of communion. Rather, we hold forth the warmth as an on-going offering to any who will take it. We make no evaluation beyond the very human acknowledgment it’s easier to deal with people who keep grabbing hold of our offer consistently. These we call “friends.” It’s a reference to track record, not some deeper reality which evades our intellectual grasp.
As a side note, this can be applied in the virtual realm. I don’t return hostility to trolls who post comments here. That doesn’t keep them from claiming a hostility, and certainly won’t turn down the heat of their rhetoric, but the whole thing is a result of what’s inside of them. For my part, the reception here is always tentative, always subject to reversal if they simply ask. Yeah, banning from commenting is reversible, but it requires some effort to send a private email. And if you decide you regret some heated comment, you can get me to delete it for you. Anyone, anywhere, can always try again. I do this because I’m hardly any better than folks who comment.
But I do have an obligation to God, best I can perceive, to limit interferences in what this blog is all about. That’s part of that Covenant of Noah, the demand from God we execute a death warrant, death that is warranted, based on certain factors in our effort to engage obedience on this broken reality here. On the ground of reality, it’s not a matter of might makes right, and I could well fail to win any physical battles, but I am obliged to obey His Laws by trying to protect certain things He burns into my convictions. If you attack my family without first convincing me it’s justified, I’ll do my best to stop you, for example.
The results of all this is hardly in my feeble hands, symbolically or literally. While I might hope to convince you of better things, it’s not a case of aiming to change your mind. I can’t; I don’t have the power. You may well be doing the best you know, and I can’t fault you for that. I’m simply doing the best I know, too. In my human weakness, the desire for obedience is all I have. Any successful obedience means I don’t attempt to make you over in my own interests, but simply tend to those interests myself. I can’t presume to saddle you with them.
The only progress I can rightly measure is my own, and that’s iffy. I’m burdened with a heavy responsibility to defeat my own damned nature, baffling and weakening it’s authority to vote on my actions and thoughts. To the degree you want a share of that action, we can cooperate.

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Jonah 4

Posted on July 7, 2012 by ehurst

With some rare exceptions, a prophetic word from God is conditional, typically a call for repentance. Rare is the prophet who isn’t thrilled to see his audience take the warning seriously, but Jonah hated his audience in the first place. Again, this was a combination of the oppression and cruelty of the imperial government in dealing with Jonah’s people, plus we now see a rather strong element of racism. Jonah preferred to see all God’s blessings for only the Nation of Israel. So Jonah groused at God for being so merciful, of all things. He begged God permission to die, since his obedience would surely bring more trouble on his homeland. God asked Jonah if this attitude was really appropriate.
Nineveh stood on the eastern bank of the Tigris in what is today northern Iraq, opposite modern Mosul. To the east of this area can be found any number of little high spots where a fellow might camp out and view the flat river plain below. For this purpose, the narrative mentions Jonah (and whomever was with him) built a booth, a light frame with vegetation for cover. It was the most common temporary shelter aside from tents. Jonah’s purpose was to watch for sure whether their repentance as sufficient to escape God’s wrath. His foul mood would be no match for God, though.
During this stay, however long it was, a large shading plant, which we believe was a Castor bean plant, grew up to reinforce the limited shade offered by the shelter. This brightened Jonah’s mood somewhat, given the sparseness of vegetation in that area. A Castor bean plant can be quite large with broad overlapping leaves, and would have made a substantial shelter by itself. They are also vulnerable to worms, and we are told one killed this extra shade Jonah had enjoyed. That same day, an eastern wind began to blow. Any such wind in that part of the world would be blistering hot and dry. Jonah suffered miserably and was once more ready to die.
In his truculence, Jonah seemed hardly careful in answering God. The prophet insisted he had every right to be angry with God in these difficult circumstances, for both the salvation of his enemies and the nasty discomfort. God had commanded him to do something utterly abhorrent and unpatriotic, forced him into doing so when he tried to flee, and now the worst of all outcomes stood before him as the city repented. Topping it all off was a blistering wind and his last bit of comfort in this world was gone. God spoke again and reminded Jonah he had felt protective of a simple piece of seasonal greenery.
Having invested nothing in the plant, why should Jonah care about its short life span? In this fallen world, such flora are simply random background scenery. Nothing justifies strong feelings about it either way. People? That’s another matter. Sure, in the vagaries of life in the broader pagan world, empires come and go. Israel had the revelation of God, His personal attention and blessings never offered to any other people anywhere on the planet, past or future. And what good did it do them? Here was a city with more than a hundred thousand souls without any such revelation from God, and they were repenting with such ardor, it should embarrass any Israelite. Jonah was rooting for the wrong side, because God could hardly claim to be on the side of the Northern Kingdom after centuries of ignoring His Word. Instead, every prophet should be glad to rejoice with anyone on this earth who embraces however much of God’s Laws they can grasp.

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Admin: New Article on Static Site

Posted on July 6, 2012 by ehurst

I’ve posted Hearing God (site is gone now) on the static site today. A note of instruction to fellow students of prophetcraft: The stuff you produce which moves you most is often going to get the weakest reception with human readers/listeners. I posted the above article on Facebook first. I felt a powerful spiritual move about it, but so far it appears only a couple of folks read it. Get used to this, and don’t let it affect your behavior.

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Trust Is the Law

Posted on July 6, 2012 by ehurst

The word “faith” has been so abused, sometimes it’s better to use a synonym like “commitment”, “loyalty” or “trust”.
It’s been my pleasure to work in the field of pastoral psychology for most of my adult life. It’s not so much what I do as a major element informing my Kingdom service. Children are one of the more interesting age groups, largely because they are the simplified version of adults, consciously expressing what almost everyone older hides from themselves.
If you encounter enough children in institutional settings, you get to where you can make intelligent guesses about their home life. It’s downright comical how parents react when children bluntly state what their neurotic parents try so hard to hide. Children are a sort of mirror for their parents. You’ve probably seen that poster, “A child who lives with…” expressing some popular myths about what forms a child’s character. As with all things born of Western society, there are elements of truth, and some major mistakes. My Westernized training in pastoral psychology echoed much of that mythology, and it’s taken some doing to correct the myths.
It still amazes me how blind some parents are. I’d be the last to suggest kids are naturally wonderful. The whole point of civilization is restraining bad impulses, but it’s pretty easy for any society to develop confusion about what is immoral versus merely inconvenient for parents, particularly in the context of that society. Here in America I’ve encountered plenty of regional subcultures which could gain a lot from the proverb: Less is more.
Given my limited experience, the first thing I usually consider in pastoral counseling is the issue of trust. Christian mysticism says you can’t trust anyone, but that comes in a context. It’s in the context you learn to trust God, the ultimate leap of faith among humans. On the way there, a human can be hit with all sorts of influences which make it so hard to do. What makes Christian mysticism easier to embrace is also what makes for good child rearing. This thing is consistent through and through. Children have to learn an appropriate level of trust in their parents before they can trust God. They start with instinctive blind trust, but it never ceases to amaze me how parents screw this up within the first few weeks of life, and it gets steadily worse from there.
Parents who are edgy and nervous about all the fussy details of life raise fearful whiny brats. These grow into the most unpleasant adults. Meanwhile, these parents are dealing with children they can hardly bear, for the precise reason the children express openly what the parents fear, and hate about themselves.
The question is not trust versus cynicism, but learning where trust belongs. The single most obvious element in any brand of mysticism is detachment from this world. If your expectations are false, you’ll never find what little peace is possible. The Christian part of Christian Mysticism says this world is terminally broken, and we shouldn’t expect much. The Laws of God do offer a modicum of material hope, but all that serves primarily to indicate things far more important which are much harder to understand.
In their defense, most parents get it wrong because someone did them wrong. Understanding this does not require my peculiar background, but correcting it is hardly so obvious. I can’t help parents teach their children trust until I help the parents heal their own damaged trust. That means getting them comfortable with trust correctly informed and correctly applied. It requires opening in their minds whole new universe, utterly separate from this one, and learning that one is trustworthy, and this one is not. It means learning almost everything upon which they have focused is fake, untrustworthy, and everything they’ve been taught to want is unavailable. It requires de-Westernizing them.
A child wholly of this world is a sad thing to behold.

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Jesus on Charity

Posted on July 5, 2012 by ehurst

The Apostle Matthew records two statements by Jesus, placing them close together in his Gospel, which shows us the proper attitude on charity and good works.
First: Just do it (see Matthew 25:31-46). It’s possible you won’t really understand all the details, but if you aren’t willing to at least consider others, you fail miserably. In terms of judgment under God’s Laws, this is the single greatest killer. Jesus also said quite bluntly, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Put their needs in the same basket with yours. You can only offer what you have, and can only do what you can do. As stated before, you need not feel the slightest conscience about needs you can’t meet. But it’s the uncaring spirit which is evil.
Second: Don’t expect to change the world (see Matthew 26:6-13). You can go too far the other way and use charitable works as an excuse to beat people over the head. Your brilliant ideas about efficiency and proper use of resources may not at all reflect divine priorities. Jesus said, in effect, so long as this earth stands, there will be poverty. It’s a feature of this fallen world, and you aren’t going to undo the Fall. God often doesn’t bother revealing His plans and why some truly nasty people are granted power to rule over us, nor why bad things happen to good people who serve Him. That’s the nature of the Fall. We humans are adamant about our minds being capable of explaining everything, and God would not be God if He didn’t show us we were wrong.
A critical element in human suffering is to drive us to His throne. It’s not supposed to make sense to you unless you work really hard to understand Heaven’s logic as revealed. Christians suffer because that’s a unique opportunity for showing His power over this earth and all its sorrows. If it gets to you, you aren’t doing it right. Suffering is also a tool for His glory, and He certainly has the authority to choose that for you.
Again, the purpose of charity is to express His sacrificial love. Everything you can see, touch or name is just a tool, not so important in itself. All the tangible universe, what you can grasp and a great deal you can’t even imagine, is not important except for the purpose it serves in bringing glory to His Name. Charity is what we do to make Him look good, not ourselves. Otherwise, don’t bother, because you will most certainly make things worse.

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The Sin of Conflation

Posted on July 4, 2012 by ehurst

conflate literally, to blow things together, implying a lack of precision and care; to confuse, to link inconsistent ideas

Americans are guilty of the sin of conflation. We have clear testimony from Scripture God holds both nations and individuals accountable to His Laws. We have clear testimony from Scripture He knows the difference, and the standards are obviously different between individuals and governments. Those who presume to lead bear a heavier burden.
On days like today, US Independence Day, you’ll see and hear attempts to stir emotional warmth about being Americans and living in a free country. We set off fireworks, picnic and barbecue, etc. Adults lecture mindless kids about what it all means. Unfortunately, it means nothing. Or rather, it means a lie. We are not a free country by any stretch of the imagination.
God would expect you to think highly of your own people. In fact, you cannot possibly obey His Laws if you don’t develop a sense of identity and belonging with your neighbors. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Your welfare and that of your neighbor is linked in His sight. There is nothing wrong with saying you are proud to be an American, same as anyone else in their country.
It’s wrong to extend that sentiment and embrace everything your country does. If you don’t criticize something wrong, you don’t love your country. All the more so when the biggest sin of all is suggesting falsely the people are the government. It’s part of our official mythology, written into the very documents which state our national founding. It was most clearly enunciated by one of the biggest liars to ever serve as President of the United States: “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. It was a lie when he implied that was a description of the US, and it was a lie when it was implied by the founding fathers of the US in our Declaration of Independence. Today, if you echo the sentiments about human rights expressed in that declaration, you’ll be labeled a terrorist.
That’s the literal truth, not hyperbole.
Nor is it acceptable to fuss at government according to partisan political agendas. If you don’t understand how both major parties are part of the same evil oppression, you are in need of adult supervision. If you dare to suggest all our military exertions are somehow something of which we should be proud, you are evil. That’s not a political statement, despite what you may think. Our record of brutality exceeds that of any enemy God denounced in Scripture through the prophets. God raised up many prophets who bluntly condemned His own people for their sins, and it was typically dismissed as political speech. I’m not making a political statement here. The American government is under God’s wrath, and if you insist on holding up our national record as something worthy of pride, you are supporting all the sins of our government.
Don’t conflate your pride in the American people with cheering on the evil your government has done.

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Added Page: Readers Comments

Posted on July 4, 2012 by ehurst

My regulars tend to be pretty smart people, and I’m proud to link their blogs when I know about them. Hanging out with them tends to make me look wiser than I am, and draws me up toward their level.
While my blog was obscure, taking less than 50 hits daily, it was pretty easy to avoid the cranks. Obscurity has its advantages. But posting on a blog carries at least a modicum of hope others will see, and perhaps enjoy something we have to say. While I approach the whole question differently than most people, if I didn’t want people reading, and reacting with comments, I’d not have bothered. I already keep a daily journal of my private ravings on my computer. So somehow I managed to gain more notice in the past year or so, and it’s not quite so peaceful.
Sometimes people assume their internal preferences apply to me. What they do on their blog simply must be how I would naturally do things here. I can’t. You aren’t me and I’m not you. That’s what makes the world so interesting and entertaining. I’d be utterly shocked if I never encountered someone who took a dislike to my words and virtual manners as the host here.
While I do try to accommodate folks, and do take into account their feelings as near as I can understand them, that is hardly paramount in what I do here. To be honest, this blog is a critical part of what I consider my job, my work, my current career. This is my virtual office. And I try to make it plain I don’t operate by everyone else’s expectations, because it’s not a customer service operation. It’s entirely possible I’m hopelessly deluded, but I honestly consider God as my immediate supervisor. He’s the One I have to please. If my sense of who He is differs from yours, you should hardly be surprised. I won’t argue with you, but I’ll do what I think I have to do, not what you think I have to do.
So instead of some simple blurb in the navigation column on the right, I find it becomes necessary to offer a longer statement of what you should expect from me as I handle your comments. It’s the tab at the top called “Readers Note”. I decided this was necessary after my most recent encounter with comments from someone who used the name “ray.” It begins at comment #6. I deleted his/her second comment because I found it off-topic, by virtue of twisting my response to mean something I’m pretty sure the grammar and context would not support. That’s a polite way of saying I’m pretty sure “ray” was trying desperately to provoke an irrational response from me. This commenter is now banned, but I wanted to let you see why I do things like that.
You be the judge, dear Reader.

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The Jesus Frisbee Syndrome

Posted on July 3, 2012 by ehurst

We don’t need another Jesus Frisbee.
Last time I checked, the official “Frisbee” is manufactured to exacting standards, and trademarked by Wham-O. It’s not as if other companies don’t make some really good competing flying disks, but while they have come a long way since kids were flying the pie plates used by the Frisbie Baking Company, there are jillions of cheap knock-offs used in advertising. The cheaper versions do okay, just slightly better than Frisbie’s pie plates in most cases, but they are still junk and anyone who throws a real Frisbee one time will immediately know the difference.
I remember going to some children’s day camp run by a particular church. Everything wrong you’ve ever seen about the abuse of cheesy and revolting advertising techniques was all over this thing. I don’t even remember the details, and for this I thank God. But the one thing which stuck in my mind was one of the staffers forbidding the kids from using a regular Frisbee from Wham-O, and requiring them all to play with one of their junk frisbees which had an image of “Jesus” stamped on it. You know, any one of those half-dozen popular American pictures of what someone imagined Jesus looked like. The image is always someone with Caucasian Medieval European hair and beard style. We know for a fact few Judeans of the First Century looked nothing like that, but it’s all about image consciousness and other godless advertising schlock, of course.
Apparently I’m not the only one to experience this disgusting cheapening of the gospel message. Sometime ago I ran across the term “Jesus Frisbee Syndrome” and knew immediately what it meant. It’s this silly demand we must throw away all the entire collection of artifacts by which we live our daily lives whenever some greedy marketer comes up with a uniquely “Christian” version. So we had loads and loads of cheesy junk of the lowest quality possible with a picture of Jesus, or some other way of claiming it was the uniquely Christian answer to whatever better products were out there.
For example, I can’t count how many bands played the garbage bar circuit in small towns, but when they changed their shtick to something resembling “Christian,” we consumers were bullied into supporting this crap. Suddenly the two-bit almost-talented band was a big hit because they were the Christian answer to whatever genre they figured they could sell. Don’t get me wrong; the early Jesus Music did see some really good musicians start their careers, but the average Christian experienced a brutal marketing pressure from all the “me too” preachers and religious leaders who never had any integrity. That’s because they were doing the same thing in their churches, having entered the ministry with whatever human talent they possessed because the market was better.
So even when we have some really great talents, the message is still dead. Remember that big hit in 1969, “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum? He was a secularized Jew. The theology in that song is just awful, an insult to the label “Christian.” The music was a stunning accomplishment in its time.
But the problem with the Jesus Frisbee Syndrome is none of that. It’s the combination of hideously bad talent and bad theology. It’s okay to use popular symbols — kitschy representations of “Jesus” — when you can match it to the real message. And I can tolerate real talent mocking the gospel, because I understand what they are saying. Sometimes I have to agree on some level with the mockery. That’s because we have cheap imitations of real preachers running cheap imitations of real churches, and organized religion will always be a justified target for lampoon. That’s because no church is ever more than humans organized for a purpose, and humans are better at making mistakes than at correcting them. It’s when those cheap suits standing behind TV-ready pulpits expect you take them seriously, and worse, take themselves seriously.
Don’t tell me I have to fall down and reverence something simply because you paid for cheap paint to apply some bumper-sticker sound-bite to something which is even cheaper. Don’t tell me Jesus will be mad if I don’t buy it. Don’t tell me I can’t call myself a Christian because I won’t give you my money for what amounts to your cast-off dirty underwear.

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Solomon's Wisdom

Posted on July 2, 2012 by ehurst

Here’s something funny for you: For all his vast human wisdom, Solomon was still a fool who set the stage for the unspeakable evil which destroyed his kingdom.
God still used him despite his flaws. Jesus was the one and only sinless man. There aren’t any humans without flaws since Him, and God has revealed His determination to use only humans in revealing His Word.
So we still revere Solomon’s wisdom to the point his name is a byword for wisdom beyond measure. He was the original scholar king, reading and writing more books than any other ruler in his class, more than many grand emperors. His literature did not include anything from famous Greek philosophers, though. He was before their time. Instead, all his great learning was Eastern.
Ever read the Book of Ecclesiastes? I had to laugh once when some pimply faced college boy told me it was Existentialism. While there may be some portions of existentialist thinking visible in the words of Solomon, it requires a Western mind to think so. In other words, it requires a determined blindness to miss almost everything Solomon had to say. Solomon was the ultimate symbol of Eastern civilization.
His little book was a record of his intellectual explorations. If you pay attention, you can see where the fundamental assumptions of Aristotelian reasoning are covered, well before Aristotle came along. There are bits of analytical logic in there, along with other useless crap Solomon tried. Sure, the ancients recognized you could use inductive logic to accomplish something, but it could not possibly take you far enough. It falls apart when you start trying to deal with human nature and morality. Solomon says that, in so many words.
People ask where I get my ideas about Eastern mysticism. Try Solomon’s writings. What I hope you don’t try is Solomon’s self-indulgent folly with human wisdom, nor would I wish upon you having to pass your whole life’s accomplishments over to such a stupid son as Rehoboam. Yet, Solomon’s and Rehoboam’s decadence can’t hold a candle to what we see in America today.
Heed the Word of the Lord, Americans. All our sins are coming home to roost and crap on our lives, but without the benefit of useful eggs, just a bunch of broken feathers of flightless idiocy and fear. Our profligate sins have left the coop wide open and Satan’s wolves will have a feast when the last glowing rays of our time in the sun are faded away. Solomon’s failures will have more shining glory in human memory than any of our alleged successes.

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Reprise: Two Realms

Posted on July 1, 2012 by ehurst

The world is fallen. It’s broken and will not be fixed. It can only be transcended.
When mankind in the Garden chose the path offered by Satan, his spirit died. While recovery was possible, it meant passing through the Flaming Sword. We know this as the symbol of God’s revelation. It’s both a threat and a gift; paradox is a primary feature of Truth. That Sword as two edges. You can reap the wrath of God’s Laws, or you can reap the blessing. If you embrace the Flaming Sword, turn it willingly on your own soul, you can pass and the Sword becomes yours to wield on His behalf. But the scabbard remains your own soul.
This truth stands on both levels. On the level here below, you can only approach truth through His revelation, His Laws. The only way the fallen soul can know God is through His demands. You aren’t family; you are merely a subject in His domain. You aren’t invited to the parties, but your life can be decent because what He requires to be at peace with Him on this earth simply isn’t that hard to understand. The degree of soulish peace (shalom) possible and the blessings of reasonable prosperity, health, social stability and security — depends on how seriously you take His Laws.
On the spiritual level, His Laws introduce your soul to the true redemption. Without the soul’s repentance under His Laws, the entrance to the Spirit Realm remains closed. The Flaming Sword must kill your fleshly self, and release your spiritual self from the grave. The fleshly self stands on the lid of your spirit’s casket, so to speak. Not that flesh will remain dead, once killed, but it’s doom is set in eternity. It remains your daily chore to keep nailing the flesh to the Cross every time it comes down. It will come down every chance it gets.
While the Law is not binding on our spirits, it remains in effect on our flesh. We aren’t under Law, but under Grace, because we are alienated from our flesh. Law still instructs our minds, though, so we can organize our response to grace. As a matter of principle, the Lord does not speak directly the mind of any man. He speaks only to the living spirit of one He has raised to life, speaking to His Spirit in our living spirit. The task of life here is to so train the mind to obey and implement the spiritual communion with God’s Spirit. The mind learns from the Spirit via the will, where the eternal convictions of God are written. The mind interfaces with the will via the conscience. The conscience is merely the intellectual reflection, the conscious awareness of the convictions burned into our will by God’s Spirit. The conscience will change, grow, gain a greater accuracy of interpretation, but convictions are unchanged from the moment of spiritual birth.
Even this is merely parable. The human mind cannot understand eternity, nor spiritual matters. It can gain some indication, but it must be taught the logic of revelation. That logic is symbolic, not analytical. The language is parabolic (of parables) and indicative, not descriptive. To the human mind, everything is uncomfortably fuzzy and variable, but the Spirit Realm is far above the capabilities of the fallen intellect. Could we see beyond our fleshly limits, we would recognize things in the Spirit Realm are more real, more solid and invariable, even as it lives and thrives and grows. So we simply accept by faith what the mind cannot grasp. We teach our minds to take a back seat, to be the servant, not the master. It is the student, the disciple who simply absorbs without question what is handed down by the teacher.
Thus, our daily task is to keep the mind focused and obedient to the Spirit-spirit communion. We assume without question we will not understand, because what our minds could grasp is not worthy of full attention. We live in a broken world and it’s a blasphemous lie to suggest our Christian duty is to make the world a better place. That simply cannot be done. We can bring truth to light in this world, and that’s the duty. Our actions are not to change things, but light a blinding fire of revelation in the gloomy darkness of this world. Our primary means of starting the blaze is that Flaming Sword. We brandish it, slicing through the death and darkness of this world. It is His unconditional love, His sacrifice of His Son, His peace and power over sin, living through our actions. They will be consistent only in the logic of Heaven, not so much to those who have no such enlightenment. And we will surely fail, because the flesh refuses to die. That’s not our problem; our mission is not to bind truth under human logic, as if any human could manifest perfect moral consistency of itself, not to force our lives to make sense to fallen minds, but to simply expose the lies with our truth, and wait on God to use His own truth to cut a path through darkened human souls. He will use our mistakes in the process, because it’s not about us, but the truth we bear. It’s not about fitness or being worthy, but His sovereign choices.
We are dismissive of our own human welfare, looking for our own cross to bear in this dying world. While we may well use our inner resources to reduce human suffering, that is not the objective. The purpose is to show His love, to show we are willing to sacrifice in His name. The Laws of God serve to instruct the mind what love looks like, because it is always consistent with the moral fabric of Creation.
Walk in His love, His truth, His revelation; observe His Laws. How hard is that?

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