They Don’t Understand Satan

Posted on April 26, 2023 by ehurst

Over the years I’ve tried to make this warning clear: If you can imagine Satan has the power to do something, you give him permission to abuse you that way.

If you suffer from the pagan delusions taught by movies, TV and other forms of entertainment regarding how Satan operates and what his powers are, then those delusions are more likely to happen. You need to get it through your head that his powers and authority are highly limited by God’s Law. But if you don’t adhere to God’s Law, then those limitations don’t apply in your case. You are giving Satan the authority to do things to you he normally couldn’t.

Stop giving him power over your life.

On the other hand, there is a whole herd of folks who are utterly certain they can tell Satan to stop doing things when God isn’t going to back them up. There is an awful lot of stuff that has been set in motion and God didn’t grant you the authority to derail it. We’re talking things that God has already approved. I’m amazed at the mass stupidity of people who have no idea how this stuff works.

So, on the one hand, everything outside of Biblical Law belongs to Satan. It’s been delivered into his hands. He does what God tells him to do with it, but he acts as God’s proxy for anything that isn’t under divine covering. The Lord covers only a tiny few things we might do, and all of them are under Biblical Law. The Covenant of Christ is a tiny narrow privilege. If you stray outside the limits — to the degree you do, and in whatever issues you do — Satan owns your butt.

Charismatic spiritual gifts do not work outside the limits of Biblical Law.

On the other hand, calling everything “satanic” is sometimes just plain stupid. It becomes a verbal excuse for doing nothing or doing too much. It’s a word game that blinds you to your moral responsibilities.

For example, Satan is destroying Western Civilization. It was built by Satan and its his to destroy, but he’s doing it at God’s command. You cannot possibly do any good trying to rebuke the Devil from tearing it down. It’s so stupid I cannot even put it into words. Yet, I’ve seen people doing things like that. Yes, Satan is destroying the West, including America, and you should be glad to see it all go. We lose only some measure of convenience and comfort, but nothing that matters in our Kingdom service.

Claiming that our government is “satanic” becomes an excuse for missing the point. It becomes an excuse for not responding according to the Word of God. For the most part, our mission is stay out of the way. They aren’t really after us. Their targets are political. Complaining is not going to make a darned bit of difference. If there is a direct threat to your feudal domain granted by God, ask Him what you should do. Pray about it before it happens, but a proactive attempt to stop the government ahead of time is simply wrong. This will be our moment with the Cross, knowing it’s coming and being ready to glorify the Lord.

Your domain is to love the brethren the way Christ loved His disciples. You have to know whom God says are your brethren. But this is how you fulfill Romans 13 — owe nothing but this sacrificial compassion of Christ for your covenant brothers and sisters. And anyone who does not qualify as covenant family gets something less than that, same as how Christ decided whom to heal and whom to leave in their sorrows. With only a tiny few exceptions, He did not heal those who weren’t under the Covenant of Moses.

You have to operate that way. You have to know when to reach out and when to crack the whip, when to weep over the body and when to raise the dead.

You aren’t going to drive demons out of the US government. It belongs to those demons, so let’s focus on the things God has called us to do about that. God intends to carry us through an apocalypse. He’s going to work miracles, but He’s not going to make everything easy for us. Most of us will still end up dead, so try to understand what God is doing through His servant, Satan.

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NT Doctrine — Acts 19

Posted on April 22, 2023 by ehurst

We come to another critical time in the early Christian religion. It’s easy to miss this point because Luke is more concerned with exonerating Paul before the Emperor’s court than with actually writing history. Luke’s narrative mentions Paul’s role in turning Ephesus into the new capital of the Christian message to the Mediterranean world.

Paul had already stopped here on his way home some months previously. He had left Aquila and Priscilla in charge, who in turn educated Apollos. When Apollos went across the sea to Corinth for a few years acting as an apostle there, it was about the same time Paul began a fresh visit to the churches he had planted. Luke tells us Paul passed through mountainous areas, hiking the back roads across the land we call Turkey today, and eventually made his way back to Ephesus as promised.

Ephesus was an ancient city, and the Roman headquarters for the entire region. It was also home of the Temple of Diana. The temple had been destroyed and rebuilt at least a couple of times in the past, and the identity of the local goddess is not certain. Later worship of Diana included elements drawn from Cybele. The idol itself was supposed to have fallen from the sky at the hand of some other ruling deity.

About all we can make of the legends is that a meteorite fell near there, and someone was able to discern in the surface of the largest piece of this space rock an image of this pagan goddess. This talisman was kept in the temple until its final destruction a few centuries later after Paul’s time. When the Greeks had conquered the area, the locals simply embraced the name of Artemis as the nearest in the Greek pantheon to the original goddess of the locals. When Persia took the area, the temple rituals gained elements of Isis worship. When it was Rome’s turn, the name of the goddess was changed to Diana.

The temple was a major source of income, keeping a large sector of the local economy busy turning out figurines and amulets celebrating the idol and the temple structure. As a natural harbor, the city saw countless tourists and business travelers who would buy these trinkets.

Upon arriving in Ephesus, one of the first things Paul encountered was a dozen Jewish men who were echoing the message Apollos had been preaching before he learned about Jesus. As a senior rabbi himself, Paul was able to get across to them the updated story, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. A major change between the Old and New Covenant was that, upon His Ascension into Heaven, Jesus sent back His own spirit to inhabit those who followed Him. The repentance ritual John the Baptist had preached symbolized this new spiritual change. As soon as these men embraced their Messiah, the power of the Holy Spirit manifested in them much as He had at Pentecost in Jerusalem.

This boosted Paul’s message significantly, because people could see the powerful change. With their support, Paul spent some months there teaching in the synagogue. A great many Jews were moved to embrace Jesus as their Messiah. However, there were some who were more worried about the institution of the synagogue, and they began slandering Paul to the local pagan people. Frustrated, Paul took the church crowd with him to a leased facility owned by someone named Tyrannus. Over the next two years, not only the City of Ephesus, but a great many surrounding towns and cities in Asia Minor heard the gospel where people embraced Jesus as Lord. Ephesus was no longer just the city of the mother goddess, but the city of the mother church that gave birth to dozens of smaller churches in the region.

Furthermore, God witnessed to Paul’s calling through miracles, so that common items of clothing over which he prayed would carry the power to heal throughout the region. But Satan was not idle, turning this whole thing into a circus. Ephesus was a famous market for magic and miracles. Jews would get in on this business by pretending to exorcise demons, a service for which they charged hefty fees. There were seven of these hucksters who called themselves “Sons of Sceva” (referring to a Chief Priest in Jerusalem) who tried to leverage the the fame of Paul and the now legendary miracle powers of Jesus to chase demons out of people. They happened to try it with a genuine case, and the demon answered that he recognized both Jesus and Paul, but these Sons of Sceva were nobodies. The demonized man brutally beat them and chased them out onto the street.

When this story made the rounds, people took Paul and his message much more seriously. The power of the gospel was changing lives on a huge scale. People began to abandon their pagan cosmopolitan morals for the strict holiness of the Christian faith. At one point, they held a bonfire in which they burned their “Ephesian Letters” — magic rituals recorded on expensive scrolls for which Ephesus was a famous market. The total value was more than a laborer could earn in two lifetimes.

At some point, Paul felt the drawing of the Spirit to revisit Macedonia and Achaia, and began talking about a need to return to Jerusalem, but to also visit Rome. To prepare for the first part of this journey, he sent a couple of friends before him into Macedonia, Timothy and Erastus, while he stayed a little longer in Ephesus. That is, he stayed until there was a major disturbance in the city.

Luke refers to this rising Christian faith as “the Way”, likely a local nickname. It was powerful enough to have changed the local economy. People were openly walking away from the polytheism so common among pagans to the point the temple traffic and trinket trade was suffering. One of the biggest supporters of this trade, named Demetrius, felt his livelihood threatened and called an ad hoc meeting of his friends. Mentioning the financial losses, and pushing lots of emotional buttons, he persuaded them to raise a lynching party and go after Paul.

It quickly turned into a riot. The leaders managed to locate two of Paul’s friends from Macedonia, Gaius and Aristarchus. They dragged these two at the head of a mob into the local outdoor theater. Paul would have done his best to rescue his friends by making himself the target of the crowd’s wrath, but some local Roman officials who better understood the situation would not allow him to take that risk.

The whole city was in an uproar. As they crowded into the theater, most had no idea what was going on. The local Jews realized that their community was threatened by this, and convinced a spokesman named Alexander to attempt to address the crowd. As soon as the crowd recognized who he was, it stirred them to even stronger emotions regarding their sacred temple and worship of Diana. As they began shouting her greatness, the chant caught on and kept going for a couple of hours.

Apparently the only man the crowd respected, the city clerk, was able to get them to listen. He gave them a stern warning that the whole city was very close to provoking a police action from the Roman soldiers stationed near the city. Not one person there could have justified all this noise and violence. There were plenty of valid ways to handle any complaints without that. He noted that the accused men hadn’t actually done anything illegal. So the clerk rebuked Demetrius and his pals and dismissed the crowd. The threat to the gospel was significantly weakened that day.

From here on out, the church in Ephesus began to rise as the primary hub for Christians and their faith, and the center of a vast mission outreach. A few decades later, it become one of the few safe refuge cities for those of Jesus’ faith among His extended family who fled Palestine, including His cousin John and probably His mother.

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How Will You Maintain?

Posted on April 21, 2023 by ehurst

In blunt terms: Stop thinking and talking about how to stop the runaway freight train from crashing. It’s going to crash. Instead, think and talk about how to avoid getting hurt by it.

The only reason you need to understand the system is so that you can get a good idea how it’s going to try to hurt you. It’s not some crazy conspiracy theory to assert that crashing down and crushing the West is wholly intentional. It should be obvious this is what’s happening. We’ve been discussing for years here how the West carries the seeds of its own destruction. It serves no purpose to strive for identifying who is doing this evil thing; it’s built in. The desire to destroy the West is part of the West itself.

On this blog, I’ve warned for years that Satan is the primary force behind the building of the West, and its his to destroy. Everyone who strives to save Western Civilization is working for the Devil; he’s the one trying to convince everyone that it’s worth saving, even while he is working to destroy it. He’s trying to distract us. Recognizing that the whole thing is coming down will help you get a perspective on the destruction of America, because it’s part of the West. It’s also going down and no human agency can stop it. The only thing Satan’s minions can do is provide a certain flavor to the collapse they also cannot prevent.

The first and single necessity is your trust in the Lord. Do you understand that He does not value Western Civilization? It is fundamentally opposed to His revelation. You should expect Him to commission Satan to execute His wrath against sin. That’s part of Satan’s role in God’s Court. God is steering this crash, so embrace it as His divine will.

He has made some promises regarding our lives in this world. If we cling to His revelation, He will provide whatever it takes to make His name glorious. Our greatest need is His glory. Every other thing we think we might need is a minor consideration, if any. Our suffering and dying are part of His glory, and we are commissioned to handle it with grace. So, when He promises to supply all our needs, He is referring to His own glory. Once you get that clear and embrace it fully, everything else is going to make more sense.

Given the bigger picture, we can expect that, for most of us, surviving impossible odds is part of His glory. What He has done in the past, carrying His people through disasters and destruction, indicates that most of us can expect to survive, provided we embrace His revelation — Biblical Law. If we walk in His Law, we can expect Him to cover us from the worst aspects of what He dishes out to the rest of the human race. His Law is our hedge against their defilement, and His wrath falls on that defilement. In the normal run of things, we’ll catch some splash, but we won’t drown.

Reminder: Jesus is God’s Law. The will of God is a Person, not a list of commandments. Any written testimony is just a manifestation of that Living Law. That written testimony shows us that, with some rare exceptions, God intends for most of us to be around after the disasters have struck.

What’s coming is an apocalypse, not the big one. There are way too many critical factors missing for this to be the End Times. The single biggest item is the lack of persecution for faith itself. Everyone out there trying to hurt us are aiming merely for political domination, and faith is simply a minor item on the list of things they intend to crush. The tone of Revelation is that faith itself will be the final target of Satan and his minions unleashed. There is, as yet, nobody out there working toward this.

Of course, if you are stupid enough to imagine that Western Christian religion is “faith”, then you won’t see this. If all the current church organizations were destroyed, it would not constitute an attack on faith. It would be just politics as usual, since too many churches have compromised with secular political activism.

No, it’s all just the same old human ambition we’ve seen since the Tower of Babel. It’s the same old effort to offer anything except what God says we must do. Globalism is opposed to a lot of sane things, but it’s not a real enemy of faith. The neocons are striving to seize global government themselves, riding on the backs of the globalists to get there, but they are not attacking faith. And I should think it’s readily apparent that at this time, even Satan is not being loosed to attack faith. He’s still performing his routine mission.

Learn this: God’s Word says that global government will fail repeatedly until the Last Days. The only global government we need to fear is one that specifically goes to war against faith. Thus, the current manifestation of Babylon is going to fall in pretty much the same way the first one fell: decentralization enforced by God’s hand. The system is not strong enough to hold together when hitched to the forces they seek to control. It’s going to collapse on its own.

In the midst of trusting God to provide for our needs, His wisdom indicates we should do what we can to prepare. When He says get out there and gather that extra measure of manna, we do so. The day without manna is coming.

You can store only so much food, so be ready to accept what you can find later. He will provide. Fill your current storage space with things that will store well and learn to like what’s there. Another thing is equipment you might use. Give it your best estimate; we’ve talked about that at length here. Imports will disappear and there is a transition period before local supply takes over. The local supply will come, but you need to be in a place where there are people and resources to provide things other people will want. Alternatively, you can always go out off-grid and provide everything for yourself. Meanwhile, whole industries will disappear, because the ruckus in our economy and society will make them superfluous.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of areas where crimes of all types will skyrocket. The ideal situation is living in a tribal extended family “castle” by any definition — a place that can protect you all together at the same time. Barring that, you’ll need to do what you can to generate a localized us-versus-them community protection mindset. Keep an eye out for predatory neighbors. When things get tight, they will come looking for your stuff. Make them think you are not an easy target.

Chances are, almost all of this will creep up slowly, not coming in big leaps and bounds. Yes, there will be surprise shocks, but the way people react to those shocks varies with how close they have been to desperation all along. A few are already looking for any opportunity because they were never in good shape in the first place. Most will wait until they cross some invisible threshold. And people can be very creative, so don’t be surprised by what they might steal, and how they might steal it, to exchange for something else. We will be learning as we go what threats we will face.

Don’t panic. The biggest danger is to develop a regime of dependency, the expectation that you simply must have certain things in order to carry on with life. Picture yourself in a homeless encampment and what your priorities might be; that might help to clear away some false expectations. For some of us, it might get that bad. Then answer the question: How will you maintain your testimony of faith?

Because that’s the number one priority regardless of what happens: How will you maintain your Lord’s reputation?

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Ride Photos 25

Posted on April 18, 2023 by ehurst

This is less about the photos and more about the riding.

After the disaster of rim failure with that expensive bike from Specialized, I decided to take a saner route. I knew that a custom build would be even more expensive, and I am capable of doing most of it myself. So I chose to get a cheaper bike with a really good frame geometry. Frames are warranted for life. I could upgrade the components at my leisure, and would not be pressured to buy the most expensive stuff.

I never understood the obsession with having the latest and greatest drive train components, nor with the debate between Shimano and SRAM. I’ve tested the cheapest and some of the more expensive versions of both, and there’s not that much difference any more. This bike came with a third brand, MicroShift. After doing the research, I opted for a couple of levels higher of the same brand simply because they were far more simple and consistent enough. And 3×8 gears is more than I use, so more is not better. I’m now running MicroShift Mezzo shifters and derailleurs.

I kept the original brake system, but opted for better brake discs. That came when I replaced the OEM wheels (32-spoke) with a tougher 36-spoke pair. The spokes began breaking, and I had not yet done any actual rough surface riding. The new ones are actually on the low end of price, but the reviews indicated they would last a while. I found they were also better at grabbing the tire beads, meaning they were less likely to pop back out during initial inflation. I’ve lost a few tubes in the past because the fit was too loose.

The most recent upgrade was an adapter for the front brake caliper. The manufacturer fitted a smaller 140mm front disc, which goes against all the shared wisdom of riders. The rear was a 160mm, just enough for a duffer like me. So in order to put the larger disc on my new front wheel, I had to order that adapter that pushes the caliber out enough to accommodate a larger disc. They match now. Also, the new rims switched me from Presta valves to Schrader, which are easier to find for this size rim.

On the side of my handlebar bag I added soft bottle carriers. The metal straps around them aren’t load bearing, but simply keep them from tipping sideways, attaching to the side of red bag. The extra bottle cages on the frame are because it can get awfully hot here in Oklahoma and I do sometimes carry up to four bottles of fluids. The little black bag atop the frame bar is a tool kit, and I carry a small tire pump under the rear rack. I’ve stopped a few times to help other people fix their bikes, so I carry a fairly substantial selection of tools I am most likely to use. Under the seat is a cable and lock, because I never know when I’m going to need to stop somewhere and go in a building that doesn’t allow bikes inside. When I need to haul stuff, I have saddle bags that slip right onto that rear rack.

The sad news is that my knees have made it clear to me that I will never be able to ride far enough for bikepacking. That dream is gone. I still plan to ride at least a little on most days of the week, and I still wear the “Bikepacking Oklahoma” t-shirts when riding, but I won’t be trying to fit the bike out for long camping trips.

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NT Doctrine — Acts 18

Posted on April 15, 2023 by ehurst

The purpose of Luke’s narrative was not to recount all the details of Paul’s ministry, but to show that he never caused trouble. In the case of Athens, when the audience lost interest in his teaching, he moved on. Corinth was roughly 50 miles west of Athens, and he could have easily walked or taken passage on a ship to the eastern port opposite Corinth. Again, I cannot do any better than my previous commentary on this chapter.

We learn from Paul’s own letters that Silas and Timothy came to him at Athens and warned him he could not return to Berea. Timothy returned there, but Silas went on to Philippi, while Paul decided to do some work in Corinth. This was the seat of the Roman government for the region of Achaia (southern Greece), and a major trade center, sitting astride the narrow neck of land separating two small seas. A lot of freight came across this place to avoid a long sailing voyage around Achaia. This was also home to the Temple of Aphrodite, with her thousand temple prostitutes. The city was the most prominent symbol of debauchery, and entirely cosmopolitan.

Paul was hardly the only one spreading the gospel message. In Corinth he met two Christian Jews from Rome, Priscilla and Acquila. They had left Italy on the orders of Emperor Claudius, decreed in about 49 AD because the Jews in Rome kept rioting over teaching and preaching about Jesus “Chrestus” — so all Jews had to leave. These two were engaged in the same business trade Paul had learned, since rabbis were not permitted to draw pay from rabbinical duties. They worked in leather and heavy fabrics during the week, and Paul would teach in the synagogue on the Sabbath. When Silas and Timothy joined him again, Paul felt driven to press the gospel message more directly and full time. This caused a reaction in the synagogue, so he symbolically turned them over to Satan. Instead, he began preaching next door at the home of Justus. When the synagogue ruler, Crispus, was converted with his household, it must have rankled the Jewish community. But Paul was encouraged by a vision, being told by God that there were many yet in the city He intended to call.

Thus, Paul broke with his habit of short stays, and remained a year and a half. Sometime around the summer of 51 AD, a new proconsul rotated into office in the city, by the name of Gallio. The Jews decided to bring their case against Paul. Their religion was officially tolerated, and they claimed Paul was inciting an attack on this religion that the law protected. Gallio was brother to the famous philosopher, Seneca, and no fool. He saw right through this as an internal matter between Jews, and none of his concern. We find the locals did not easily tolerate the Jews. As soon as they saw this curt dismissal, with troops driving them from Gallio’s open-air judgment seat, the locals began beating the new leader of the synagogue, Sosthenes. While technically a breach of peace, Gallio acted as if nothing happened, in part to underline his own distaste for Jews.

Paul stayed even longer in the city. Eventually, it was time to go. On the eastern coast was the port city of Cenchreae, the other end of the famous wagon track across the isthmus. There Paul went to a Jewish ritual barber to shave his head. This signaled the completion of a Nazarite vow, showing that Paul still took his Jewish practices seriously. Priscilla and Acquila came with him as they sailed to Ephesus, where the two took up residence, preparing to amplify Paul’s mission by witnessing there. Paul appeared briefly in the synagogue, where his message was well received. But when they asked him to stay, he declined because of a commitment to be in Jerusalem for some feast. He promised to return sometime, if God willed. Then he sailed for Caesarea, on the coast of Palestine. He made the feast in Jerusalem and spent some time with the church there. Then he returned to Antioch with his mission report. While church scholars make much of breaking Paul’s work into specific journeys, Luke simply notes briefly Paul later went back north and west to the first churches he planted.

Now more than two decades after the Ascension of Christ, there were still a large number of devout Jews who did not hear about the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. They knew only the revival of John the Baptist, the call to repentance, the return of genuine Old Testament faith, and some of the teaching of Jesus. Among these was a very sharp fellow named Apollos, from Alexandria, Egypt. He arrived in Ephesus during this time frame, and very powerfully witnessed in the synagogue there of this revival of true Hebraic faith. Paul’s friends, Priscilla and Acquila heard this man, and met with him privately to share the rest of the story, how Jesus died and became the final sacrifice for all sins. With this new message, Apollos felt called to preach in Achaia, and was given letters of introduction to the Christians there. With their warm welcome, he stood up among the Jews, and in a very public debate, proved their sin in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah.

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Immediate Failure

Posted on April 13, 2023 by ehurst

Brandon Smith paints a nightmare scenario regarding Central Bank Digital Currencies. You aren’t likely to find a more accurate and readable explanation of how it will work. What Smith won’t tell you is how it will fail. Just at the point when this awful evil centralized power reaches its crescendo, it will fracture into a jillion shards.

It’s in the nature of the thing. The barriers government will raise will simply spawn a massive underground economy. Granted, with a bad social score and your official currency access locked, there are things you won’t be able to do. However, it will be only temporary, because there simply is not enough enforcement manpower to prevent people building an alternative market for the things they refuse to do without.

Have you noticed how well law enforcement is doing with squelching the drug trade? It’s only a niche market, as it is with all vices, and yet people are still getting high, and the suppliers are getting filthy rich. Now imagine a far larger underground market in basic survival goods and services. There simply is no way to control human behavior on that scale in the current context.

As noted previously, if you would like to survive in the future, start now gathering the things you will need to function. What should you expect? First would be a much higher percentage of poverty. The cost of living will rise and push the poverty line much higher, so that a greater portion of the population will be “poor”. Much of the current economic activity will slow down. A lot of small businesses will disappear, eventually replaced with an informal market.

This is a good time to get your teeth fixed or have any other essential surgeries. It may be ten or twenty years before the market for that opens back up. Buy hand powered tools you know how to use. Don’t plan on having access to a strong vehicle maintenance market; it will be more like parts of the world where people keep driving stuff that’s falling apart, barely moving on its own power. It’s a good time to invest in alternative transport, things powered by muscle (human or animal). It is most certainly not a good time to go with e-vehicles.

Electrical power, where it still exists, will be outrageously expensive. If you absolutely have to use it, invest in alternative means of generation. It’s a very good time to learn how to repair any sort of thing people are likely to keep using. Even better, learn how to repair stuff in general. You’ll always have work. Learn how to make things work with a very minimal of replacement of parts, or how to keep them working on rigged up bits and pieces you can get your hands on.

Learn how to move stuff that people are going to want moved to another place. What can’t be moved will need to be replicated another way. Think about how that can be done. Watch a few videos of how people in low income countries get by. Don’t try to imagine ideal social structures; wait to see what forms once the system comes apart. Think about ways to build for what arises.

In America in particular, clothing is a very big issue, in that it currently is not an issue at all. Our current consumption depends almost entirely on cheap imports. Nothing has to last very long because its cheap to replace. What will people wear when that market disappears? What happens with synthetic fabrics and injection molded foam disappears from the shelves? They will. Virtually none of that stuff can be repaired. Try to imagine how folks lived before mass produced fabrics and shoes. In some places, it will be like that until the old systems long abandoned are restarted.

Salvage will keep things going for a long time. Learn how to reuse discarded stuff.

We’ll have to learn all over again how to eat. We will rediscover the joy of making from scratch, and taking whatever we can get our hands on as the scratch we use. Again, imports will die, so anything that isn’t locally produced, or cannot be locally produced, will be mostly unavailable, at least for a while. The trade and transport system will have to be rebuilt from scratch.

This is where you start to pray for your state and local governments, that they will be ready to pick up the slack. Pray that your state and local officials are ready to secede from the federal government, if not officially, then in practice. They have to be ready to enable and manage the economy without the federal provisions. What you can’t provide locally, you’ll do without: banking, currency, exchange of funds, basic life support, etc.

If you go by the likes of Brandon Smith, that new life in a decentralized economy may be here in the next few years. The idiots are convinced they can make this total control happen, and they are already putting things in place. And it will fail almost immediately. Meanwhile, you can keep an eye on the progress of things for now, because public Internet access is critical to the plan, but it will become ever more a walled garden of limited access.

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About Government Secrets

Posted on April 12, 2023 by ehurst

In the Army, I had a clearance and had to handle sensitive stuff. Sometimes I cranked out reports that were sensitive. What matters here is not the secrets, but protocols that aren’t secret in themselves.

When I wrote a report, I had to be very careful to get the formatting perfect, and had to use the official jargon. My talent as a writer meant nothing; it had to follow all the proper protocols and preferred wording. It was Army-speak — dull, boring, a limited vocabulary, and somewhat obfuscated by all the peculiar grammar.

Stuff was always being improperly disclosed. Possibilities: There are accidental disclosures. There are people removing materials from their proper secure location for whatever reason. Sometimes they used it improperly; sometimes they passed it onto third parties (spying). Leaks are a wholly different kind of thing. In my experience, nothing was ever leaked that hadn’t been approved by someone. The approval might be official, but often enough, it was tacit. It was always with the purpose to deceive the public.

The deception might be in a limited hang-out, keeping back critical context (omission), so that the public misses the point. Sometimes it’s “secret” stuff that’s been cooked up to be partly false — i.e. there were flat out lies included. You should keep in mind that some material is false because the intel folks are downright incompetent. You just cannot imagine… Sometimes the materials are false because the superiors want to be told what they already believe.

More than once it was my job to cover up wrongdoing. It wasn’t a matter of merely hiding under secrecy some embarrassing thing, but lying into the record when I wrote what I was told to write. I can’t count how many times I was required to withdraw an accurate report of what I saw, throw it away, and write something else and sign it.

Keep all of that in mind when you hear in the news that something was leaked.

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Meet Your New Apocalypse

Posted on April 11, 2023 by ehurst

Just a few things to think about in the midst of political turmoil…

We focus on keeping our testimony alive, not our bodies. If our lives do not testify of the Father’s glory, there’s no reason He would keep us here. There’s no point surviving an apocalypse on Earth if you aren’t pointing to the Kingdom of Heaven.

There is no way possible for the people to rise up against the federal government. Do you realize that the few times anything came even close to that, it was provoked by Deep State figures for their use? Do you understand that virtually every significant assassination was carried out by the Deep State? We have no history of popular uprisings, and today’s generations are ever less likely to even understand why we might do so.

No, the only hope anyone has for evading slavery under the globalists and neocons is the rebellion of the states. This is how the US Beast will die. If you are living in a Blue State then you’ll suffer the wokism of globalist government. If you are living in a Red State you’ll still have to contend with the slimy manipulation of the neocons. Choose your poison. But to the degree any kind of liberty will be restored, it will be your state government. Decentralization is coming; keep your eyes open for various opportunities for constitutional crisis.

The majority of you would prefer a Red State government, simply because most of them would be likely to roll back egregious federal restrictions. But not all of the restriction, nor all of the Red State governments, by any means. Nobody is looking out for our actual well-being, but they will pretend they do. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

There are some things to keep in mind. If you are of the prepper mold, you can stock up on food, but nobody has a secure warehouse big enough to last very long without fresh supplies. The real issue is not how much you can store up, but whether you have the knowledge, skills and inclination to get more food when that runs out. It’s far more important to be good at getting food than to have a bunch of it. Just keep a little for emergencies and learn how to work with God’s ways to stay alive.

Always give Him room to take you Home earlier than you expected, and never be surprised by how He does it.

Along those lines, should you have serious doubts about whether you can endure torture, plan on resisting to the death. Make sure they are forced to kill you, because one thing’s for certain: You will be tortured if there’s any kind of round up. The US government is one of the worst in human history about tormenting people they don’t like. If you don’t sense a mission call to walk through that, don’t surrender alive.

Here’s a few more practical considerations. You may know the sunspot cycle is eleven years, and we are currently sliding into the peak of sunspot activity. From all we can see right now, the CMEs and flares have been pretty lightweight, and almost nothing hits Earth directly. Our magnetic shield is not so weak yet, except for the South Atlantic Anomaly. But as the magnetic poles shift quickly toward convergence at some spot just off the western coast of Malaysia, the general condition of that shield will decline dramatically. The next sunspot maximum hits in the mid-2030s, and that’s when we are likely to see the most damage before the micro-nova likely to come in the mid-2040s.

A significant CME that comes through the shield will heat all metal items. For example, the high tension power lines strung from high towers will heat and sag, breaking the connections and burning up all the transformers — they’ll mostly explode. A major flare will fry anything electronic. So you should be prepared to live without any electricity of any kind at least by the mid-2030s. Anything that could possibly survive that would be decisively wiped out in the micro-nova.

If you hope to survive all of the coming solar catastrophes, you’ll need a shelter with a good bit of rock between you and the sky, but zero metal. Concrete bunkers will not be safe. Anything that engages our magnetic shield — CMEs, flares, the coming micro-nova — will create a very heavy electrical flux. Protect your hand powered tools. There’s a good chance, for example, your shovel will survive if it’s not touching other metal implements; spread them out. You can put small items in plastic tubs and likely be okay, but a Faraday Cage would itself become extremely hot. There will be no safe grounding possible; the earth itself will be highly charged. We’ll see clear-sky lightening arcing down and burning patches of the ground.

And then, when Sol pukes up the accretion of excuse material, there’s all the charged particles and large clumps that congeal and turn hard before they get here, forming meteorites. It will be a huge mess. The majority of life on the earth will be destroyed. But to survive that, you still have to get through the political crap that’s stirring up right now.

The whole point is that people of faith need to dig ever deeper into that faith. There’s going to be less and less you can do about anything. The only thing you can really do is nail your fleshly nature to the Cross ever more firmly. Even that comes from the power God grants to His covenant children.

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Catacomb Resident Is Back

Posted on April 10, 2023 by ehurst

FYI: Catacomb Resident is on Substack. If you aren’t used to the way Substack works, clicking the link takes you to a landing page where you are encouraged to subscribe. But if click “No thanks” you’ll see the front page of the blog and get to choose which post to read. The whole idea is to focus more on subscriptions than simply having a blog. Still, you can read the posts without much more than an extra click.

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NT Doctrine — Acts 17:16-34

Posted on April 8, 2023 by ehurst

Luke returns to the third person, so he may have stayed for a time in Philippi. After leaving a very strongly established church in Philippi, the trio — Paul, Silas and Timothy — traveled along the Egnation Way to the next important city. They knew that if they could establish the gospel in major centers, the message itself would spread out into the countryside. They stopped in Thessalonica and, as usual, spent time in the local synagogue.

It was the pattern by now: Some would embrace the gospel, more Gentiles than Jews. And it’s the loss of Gentile contributors that stung the synagogues most. So they would hire some local thugs to create drama and Paul, at least, had to flee. All three of them left Thessalonica and got off the beaten path, stopping at a town name Beroea (Veria today). This bunch were more inclined to study the written Scriptures and generally received the message, until Jews from Thessalonica tracked down our trio and provoked another uproar there.

This time Paul was escorted alone to the coast and put on a boat to Athens. Silas and Timothy stayed a while longer to get the church established, and waited until they found out where Paul ended up. It was a substantial voyage around the eastern Greek islands down to Athens. Upon disembarking, Paul sent his escort back with word to his companions to join him. At this point I’ll finish by replaying what I wrote in my commentary on Acts.

While Paul’s escort made its way back with the message for his companions, he wandered Athens.

While a city very self-conscious of its ancient grand heritage, Athens was no longer a seat of government under Rome, just an ancient university town. The world’s scholars still came, seeking philosophical and religious knowledge. Paul hadn’t really planned to exert much effort there because the city just wasn’t that important. Still, he spoke in the synagogue, and in the open market with anyone else who showed an interest. Of particular discomfort to Paul was the plethora of deities whose altars and shrines were thickly dotted around the place. Legend has it that when catastrophe struck, the residents would simply set loose a flock of sacrificial sheep in hopes that somehow the gods who were upset would draw one or more victims to their altars. When a sheep was found near no particular altar, a new one was erected to “The Unknown God”. There were several of these around the city.

With his advanced education, Paul fit right in with the intellectual atmosphere. The current fashionable schools were Epicurean and Stoic. The local education council decided to test him for certification, since his subject matter was new to them. Here we see in stark relief just how much of a barrier Hellenistic intellectual assumptions were to the gospel. The Epicureans asserted that the gods hardly cared about human affairs, and surely there was no afterlife. Man could, at best, try to enjoy life in grand style, though not in raw hedonism. The Stoics felt man had a duty to live by natural law, and tended to rather strict ethical conduct. Both were afflicted with the foundations of Plato and Aristotle, making no allowance for anything they could not see or theorize from reason.

Paul was willing to outline his gospel message. He began by making note of the local religious culture, and selected the altars to the Unknown God as his anchor point. From there he outlined the basic claims: Jehovah is Creator and Sustainer of all life. All mankind came from His hand, and He is directly involved in natural and human affairs. However, He permitted humans to wander a bit with religion. Here and there one could find glimpses of the truth, Paul noting a smattering of accurate ideas in pagan philosophy and religion. However, He had finally revealed Himself with the intention of calling all men to an accurate knowledge of Him, who was too transcendent for man-made idols or temples, but a spiritual being far apart from His Creation. The final revelation was a particular Man apart, who was so marked by His resurrection from the dead.

At that point, Paul had stepped outside the acceptable ideas of Greek philosophical assumptions. They had no place for the notion of mere mortal bodies being resurrected. Anything tangible and real was of necessity inferior. In their world, there was no place for a belief in a human spirit, an eternal soul that could be contained in flesh. The educators politely tabled the notion of granting Paul a license to teach, while some of them sarcastically dismissed his ideas. There were a few who embraced his teaching, among them a Dionysius and a Damaris. We have no record of any church ever existing in Athens during this time.

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