Telling the Story Again, Part 1

Posted on August 26, 2024 by ehurst

As always, I can only declare what I see. I know for certain there are things I don’t see, but it’s my instinct to make the most of what I do see. The problem is that I can see a lot better than I can explain. Still, I share this vision with others because they keep asking for it. Several people have asked questions privately that indicate I should try to declare things again. I’m trying to take advantage of my training to offer the same basic ideas clothed in different mental approaches so that everyone can get the picture. In particular, the questions concern comments I’ve made about Jews, Israel and the broader context.

The broader context is the Unseen Realm, of course, but far more than is covered in Michael Heiser’s books. We cannot make sense of the world from inside our mortal fallen existence. Without divine revelation, I am convinced nothing makes sense at all. God reveals Himself in terms of an eastern potentate big enough to have an empire. That was His choice of imagery, not mine. An eastern emperor would have a massive staff of people who hold specialized knowledge and privileges. Thus, the idea of a whole class of higher beings, of which angels are but one small portion, is simply too obvious to ignore. We humans are truly insignificant on that scale, and the role we play is in some ways no more than a football in a long game.

Humanity is little more than the symbol of a much larger drama. Our eternal destiny is more significant, but our current existence is almost wholly symbolic. Our mortal fates as humans is simply not important. The high moral outlook of the Bible is not about placing a high value on human existence; quite the contrary. What really matters is expressing the character of God to all of Creation, which is considerably larger than humanity. We get lost by making humans the subject when we are simply the object. What’s important to us should never be us.

The real drama consists of all the figures we cannot see with our eyes. It is the whole range of authorities in Heaven that shape our human existence. From our perspective, what really matters is the rebellion of the Devil. Keep in mind that terms like Devil, Satan and even Lucifer are all titles, not personal names. Individual personal identity is a human obsession; in the Spirit Realm, roles and titles are everything. We cannot know the identity of the major figures; all we have is the roles they play.

The role of Satan is more subtle and complex than we will ever understand. He is at the same time a rebel and faithful servant. To understand his role requires grasping how context shifts and what his role demands within the varying context. God has revealed the role Satan plays in our existence, and hints at the wider context of that role. We are told that this figure’s original assignment was roughly equivalent to Chief Bodyguard for God. His role included passing glory to God, and the prophets reveal that he tried to embezzle some of that glory for himself. His fundamental failure was insisting that he was high enough up the chain of existence that he warranted some worship.

This is what the prophecies point out as his characteristic flaw. Apparently he had no trouble convincing some of the staff in Heaven to embrace the same mistake. It was a political movement, but not the kind of thing where God just destroyed them all. He valued something in this situation that called for allowing them to keep on living, but with constraints. And in the process, God conceived a need to explain Himself to some unknown audience — not us. In the process of executing His discipline on His staff, Satan was confined in a prison outside of the Spirit Realm.

That prison was connected to the Garden of Eden, where God had placed a rather insignificant hobby of His — humans as gardeners. We can only guess, but it appears part of Satan’s original complaint was that all of our fealty went to God, and he got none of it. In the midst of this dispute with God, Satan developed a vile hatred for us. We can only speculate, but perhaps it has to do with resentment that God gave us immortality within the purpose of keeping the Garden. Satan doesn’t seem to hate the Garden, only humans.

As part of this dispute, Satan convinced others to embrace his clamor for God to allow himself and others on the divine staff to receive worship. This was the fundamental nature of his temptation of humans, too. It’s as if his whole repertoire rests entirely on this one thing, to tempt others to seek godhood. It’s important to understand that he wants the powers and authority of a god, and the best way to do that is to sucker folks into worshiping him. He’s trying to build his kingdom. That he was banished to a prison means that he’s trying to provoke God to put others in that same prison where he will reign.

But it’s not just suckering us into our demise; he gets his jollies from tormenting. This is another primary signature of his work. Anyone who delights in tormenting others is most assuredly serving the Devil. Side note: The Bible differentiates between a grisly execution (aiming at reputational shame) versus tormenting while alive (debasing).

At any rate, from the Garden, we humans did not so much lose our immortality as suffer having it masked by confinement in a mortal condition. Even saying that much is merely interpretive, a parable. It depends on how you look at it; it’s contextual. The whole thing is revealed to us in parables because the truth transcends clinical language.

Further, it’s not simply a historical decision made by a couple of representative humans; there’s something fundamental to the ineffable context. To be human is to be vulnerable to the temptation Satan offered. We would all have done the same thing had we stood in place of Adam and Eve. It is characteristic of being human. Satan took advantage of our natures and the rules we could not possibly understand.

In the midst of this setting, several events figure large in the Bible narrative as a way of filtering out all the other stuff that happened in the human realm. The whole point was not to record human history, but rather a narrative of the interaction between the Unseen Realm and the mortal realm in which we live. The way in which God makes His case before that unknown audience includes all the things recorded in the Bible, at least from our human perspective.

And as part of that process of revelation, we have the nation of Israel and the story of how God’s Chosen became Satan’s primary weapon against humanity.

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NT Doctrine — Hebrews 3

Posted on August 24, 2024 by ehurst

I’ll share here my previous commentary on this chapter.

The Exodus was the very foundation, the defining event of Israel. If the Exodus was a myth, so was Israel as a nation. While they pointed with some smugness to their specialness before the Lord some fourteen centuries later, they paid only lip service to the duty of expressing contrition for the nation flinging challenge after challenge into God’s face. The story of the Exodus is the sad tale of whining and bickering slaves who preferred their slavery to the freedom and identity as God’s Own People. The entire Exodus generation remained unfit for the Promised Land, conditioned as they were to bondage.

Our writer calls this to mind, charging that his readers are the same sort of people. When Christ came to fulfill the promises of Exodus, how very many of God’s Own People rejected Him! The Roman Jews were among those called into the Kingdom of Heaven, a far higher calling than the Kingdom of Israel. Christ, God Himself, called them. If Moses can be held up as the model of faithfulness, who was but a servant in the household of God, how much more Christ the Son? Christ formed a household as His inheritance; Christ built it.

And it was Christ who faithfully discharged all the duties of His Sonship. If He owned it all, He was the very definition of faithfulness. The first household was just an earthly temple. When its purpose was fulfilled in His death on the Cross, it was torn down. From the rubble were found a few stones still of use to God. He chose from among the Jews, but also from the rest of humanity, stones suitable for His house. He built up His household by His teaching and power, the means of trying the stones. These Roman Jews were a part of those passing the test. How then could they return to a house that no longer stands, except in the fallen imagination of mere men? Hold fast the confession of your faith in Christ! It is the only thing that is real.

The writer quotes Psalm 95:7-11. There David recalls testing of the Lord by Israel at Meribah (Rebellion) and Massah (Trial) in Exodus 17:2-7. This was rather early in the journey up from slavery, during the first shock of introduction to desert nomad living. Had they but called out to God in faith, the whole scene would have been remembered as a triumph. Instead, they gave Moses much grief and God took it personally. For the next forty years, Jehovah faithfully stood by them, led them and took care of their every need. Every step of the way, they whined and attacked God’s chosen servant. For the Roman Jews, Jesus was the new Servant, the actual Son of God. This Roman persecution was just the spiritual nomad boot camp. Bitterly wishing they had not come on this spiritual journey was to wish for slavery, granting Satan the victory. It was treason to side with the enemy.

As the Lord swore in His just wrath that the Exodus generation would die in the wilderness, so the Roman Jewish Christians risked losing all hope of finding the true Promised Land of Heaven. Those without Heaven in their souls cannot enter Heaven when they die. Allowing doubts to rise about whether serving Christ was worth it was silly. The word “today” is but the moment of testing and is quickly past. Today we should all face testing with joy and confidence. Were these readers among those who would die in the spiritual wilderness today? Or were they among those who clung to the revelation of Christ and would pass into the Promised Land to see God’s face?

No one can do it for you. God will carry you through, but you must accept His power to commit yourself to His plans. They won’t be like your plans, no more than the Exodus brought Israel to a place like Egypt. Their souls were at home in the swampy river bottom of slavery, not out in the rocky heights of freedom in Christ. All you have to do is hang onto Him.

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Mission for the Apocalypse

Posted on August 23, 2024 by ehurst

Human conflict will increasingly consume everything in sight. The nightmare has just begun.

Let’s review the knowns: Netanyahu is determined to provoke an apocalypse. It is plainly obvious from his actions and words that he desires deeply a global war centered on his country. He is desperately trying to drag the US into his petty conflict in hopes that our involvement will force the rest of the world to line up on one side or the other. It really doesn’t matter why he is so committed to this nightmare; what matters is that this is what he is consciously trying to do.

Zelensky holds a similar commitment for his country. He doesn’t give a damn about the people of Ukraine; it’s all about him and his war. For the time being, nobody is talking about whether Zelensky and Netanyahu are in direct competition or pretending to ignore each other. However, they do share a fundamental commitment to destroying the West. Their actions and their planning makes a lot more sense when you understand their hatred first and foremost for European people and all their derived countries.

These two men are Jews; both participate in this fundamental assumption that their kind are the only real humans on the planet, and all other races are cockroaches. Their people are divine, worthy of worship and honor. Because we fail to give that honor, they will seek to destroy us from within. They hate us so deeply that we cannot begin to comprehend it. They get all riled up when we dare to mention any of this. We are unworthy of even the knowledge, much less sharing it.

No, not all Jews are this way. Only the leadership is like this — the master planners among neocons, Zionists, and in the background of every globalist agency. They are playing both sides against each other; every current political agenda and authority in the West is their creature. For the time being, they have managed to squelch the broad social response to any other political opinion. Anyone who dares refer to them remains far out on the fringes of public notice.

If you understand the grip they hold on all things here in the West, then you are in a better position to decide what God wants you to do about the problems we all face. We’ve said it often enough: Political/military action will accomplish nothing that matters. That is their home field; God has given this into their hands for His own inscrutable reasons. We can suss out some portions of the big picture, but it’s fundamentally out of our reach. Instead, we are granted parables and models that we can understand in order to motivate and guide our choices.

Jesus and His Apostles have all said that Jews as Jews are inherently evil. Jesus’ cousin John, both born as Jews themselves, called the Jewish leadership the Synagogue of Satan (Revelation 2:9 and 3:9). They are the children of Satan. Here’s the odd thing: The best way to understand God’s will for humanity is to embrace what Jews had abandoned, the Hebraic truth to which Jesus kept calling them back. The adamance of their refusal was symbolized in the crucifixion. Individually, any of them will be welcomed back into the Covenant, and they will even have certain advantages over Gentile believers, but as long as they remain under their own false covenant, they are damned.

The only warfare that works against Jews is flaunting in their faces the divine heritage they have abandoned. This is the biblical strategy for handling them. Their ascendancy in human terms is meaningless; it is what God is allowing for now. They can attack the flesh all they like, but what really matters is how things register in Heaven. This world is Satan’s home and he uses them as his chief servants. If you were to kill them all, he would simply grab someone else and they would believe and act the same way. As long as there are mortals in this world, someone is going to play that role. Hating them is exactly what the Devil wants us to do. Don’t play into his hands.

The only passion we need in all of this is a zeal for God’s truth to be clearly shown. Don’t lose track of this vision. This is our reality. None of it will make sense on a human level; don’t expect to lay a foundation that is reasonable and logical. The only use for reason and logic is to serve the divine truth and implement ways to manifest it.

For me, that is currently a mission of words. The keyboard is my sword. There will come a day when that door will close; I’ll know what to do when we get closer to that. For now, my mission is to write the truth as best I can understand it. Everything I have and do is organized for that message. I’m committed to sharing it. What is your mission for the apocalypse?

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How Will You?

Posted on August 22, 2024 by ehurst

We are not in the First Century Roman Empire, nor are any of us Mediterranean subjects of Rome. This is a different world, different culture, different times, etc.

Like many of you, I feel a deep sorrow over the evil men do. And it certainly seems to be getting worse by the day. It’s not as if God doesn’t notice, but He isn’t bound by our logic. His actions aren’t always obvious, and His frame of reference on time is far longer than ours. The whole point is that we obey regardless of the visible consequences, that we obey because it’s who we are. The outcomes will never be in our hands.

We believe that there’s no worldly purpose in engaging human political ambitions. No good thing can come from activism, if your intention is to make things better. That still leaves an awful lot of room for doing things that simply make a clear statement condemning sin. In other words, we will denounce the political system in words for sure, but maybe in the actions we take that might serve to disrupt the evil, and maybe even engage in open resistance.

We aren’t so much trying to stop it as to make it painfully obvious to all that our government is hopelessly and relentlessly evil, wicked, mean and nasty. Our government hates us and is at war with us. Oh, and to some degree, the same goes with every other human government on this planet. Not a one has embraced the Covenant of Noah as God requires, so all of them are invalid. The only issue is whether they make trouble for people in the Covenant of Christ. In the West, the rulers are determined to stamp out the gospel when they can’t pervert it to their own benefit.

I’ve already admitted that it’s conceivable I would use physical violence against agents of a US federal government that clearly hates us and is intent of destroying us. Millions of Americans have said it openly, so I’m in good company. However, it’s not as if I’m plotting any kind of armed revolt. I tend to de-emphasize that possibility in favor of my preferred form of combat: information warfare. It’s not a question of changing government, nor its actions, but of making lots of noise about what is good and evil as God has declared it. For now, that means mostly using the Internet as the way to conduct that warfare.

There was a time when Linux was just a hobby for me. I invested countless hours in learning a lot about it. Linux has become both less and far more than that. It has become one of the best weapons I have in the infowar. You probably don’t need Linux; that’s fine. But if you do, I’ll be glad to help you get it and use it without having to dig any deeper than you did into Windows. Indeed, given my recent experience with Windows 11, I’d say Kubuntu is far less complicated for the average user and offers a lot more choices.

And best of all, using something like Kubuntu makes it a whole lot harder for government or its lackeys in Big Tech to mess with your private life. If you choose to learn a bit about Linux, it becomes a weapon they cannot easily target for suppression. If you own a system running Linux, it really is totally yours; there are no secret codes held by super users at Microsoft or anyone to whom they choose to sell keys to your system. It’s fully your computer.

One more thing: All of those Win10 systems that cannot run Win11? Most of them will have no trouble running Kubuntu, or something similar, for many years to come. Indeed, some of your Win7 machines will probably work just fine.

Nor is this some campaign for free speech or any other human rights. I assert the divine mandate to speak His truth any time, any place, any way I can. I will not be silent. That said, you must decide for yourself what role you play in this apocalypse. How will you manifest His glory?

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Kubuntu 24.04 on Dell Latitude 3540

Posted on August 21, 2024 by ehurst

Everything works out of the box, though it does require some effort to configure a couple of things. The biggest item: I got my laptop to hibernate on Kubuntu 24.04. A few years ago I wrote a long blog post about making it work on earlier versions of the Ubuntu/Mint family of distros, but it has gotten more complicated. It’s not the distro’s fault; it’s because of changes in things like SystemD and other upstream modifications.

First, let me point you to my primary source on the more recent procedure: How to Enable Hibernate Function in Ubuntu 24.04 & 22.04 LTS by Ji M. This is the best, most complete single reference I’ve seen.

Note: You must go into the BIOS and turn off secure boot. It’s a notorious old lie calling it “secure boot”. The only thing it secures is Microsofts’s control over your system. In actual practice, it makes the system less secure, because it’s an attack vector for some malware. Turn it off; you’ll never miss it. UEFI itself is not a problem. And on some laptops (like Dells) you’ll also need to switch the harddrive from RAID mode to ACPI in order to install Linux. Most other BIOS settings should be okay.

Ji does mention making sure you have swap working, but misses something I ran into: Having too small of a swap space. By default, Kubuntu and friends will choose a swap file instead of a swap partition. Unfortunately, it also makes one too small for hibernation. So, I’ll say your first step is to get that fixed, and I recommend this guide, which offers plenty of hand-holding to get you through it. No reboot required.

On my laptop, Kubuntu gave me a 512MB (half-GB) which is woefully inadequate for hibernation. I bumped it up to 8GB simply because my system has 16GB of RAM. While Linux loves to spread itself all across most of that, when compacting down for hibernation, it has so far fit well inside my new larger swap file.

After you get that fixed, then proceed with the detailed fix Ji lays out at the handbook site. I note that, instead of using UUID to identify the resume instructions in the GRUB line, he recommends using the “/dev/nvme????????” tag. I set mine up that way.

One more note: Kubuntu tends to act a little odd unless you properly identify your laptop keyboard. Under settings, look for “Input Devices” and under keyboard, don’t accept the generic 104 key setting. Check to see if there’s something more accurate. In my case, there was a setting for Dell Latitude laptops, which works fine. Without that, some keyboard and mouse functions for me were not yielding the expected behavior.

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Interesting Times

Posted on August 20, 2024 by ehurst

I have come to believe that the elections, now just over 2 months away, simply aren’t that important. Yes, they will certainly affect us. Whichever bunch wins will have a lot to do with the flavor of our apocalypse, but it will be an apocalypse either way. As such, any comments about the election are speculative and are of small consequence.

Did Trump actually die after all? Did the bullet that clipped his ear manage to somehow take his soul, leaving the shell of the man? If you have been watching Trump lately, you might get the impression he was already dead. It’s not just the MSM propaganda; right, alt-right and independent sources have suggested that he is not himself. Trump always knew how to manipulate the press, so if he wants to be in the news, he knows how to do that.

Someone got to him, and it looks like he’s throwing the match. Not in the sense of bought off, but I believe he’s been boxed in by the Deep State and Zionists. He’s just a figurehead now and he hates it. What we are seeing is due to instability and in-fighting among those who actually rule America in the first place. The Zionists are not united, and the neocons are following their own agenda. Their conflicts result in the situation you see.

I’ve already said that I’m not getting any word from God on these things. All I can do is try to sense the moral currents of this world. Right now it feels like things have shifted since last month. Trump may miss the window; he has failed to seize the opportunity so far. It is slipping through his fingers. It seems to me that God offered him a chance to play the role but Trump doesn’t like what comes with it.

Given the current trends, he will not make it into office. He must turn this around very soon or it will be too late. Then again, it could be that we are about to experience something so shocking that the whole question will fade into insignificance. Still, it seems for now that we face the obvious threat of a Harris presidency (if we have an election). That will be nightmare enough. At this point, we should prepare for the globalist flavor.

We live in interesting times.

Addenda: If you have the time, this article outlines the conflict behind the scenes between Zionists and neocons.

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Kubuntu: Still the Shortest Path to Linux

Posted on August 19, 2024 by ehurst

Some years ago, I published an ebook: The Shortest Path to Linux featuring Kubuntu Linux. The contents are long out of date, as is typical of the fast moving field of computer technology. Still, regardless of what you may think of Canonical (the company behind it), their flagship Ubuntu and all of its branches and clones, Kubuntu remains the easiest way for a Windows user to get acquainted with Linux, in particular because it features the KDE desktop. KDE is modeled somewhat on the layout and integrated functions of Windows.

Recently, I tried several distributions I had used in the past on various hardware collections, but this time on a laptop (Dell Latitude 3540) that originally shipped with Windows 11: Mint, PCLinuxOS, OpenSUSE and Kubuntu. No, I didn’t try any of the RedHat derivatives because the kernel is too old and KDE is very hard to get for it. I tried to work with Win11, but I quickly came to hate it. There were too many restrictions and frustrations. After testing how well each of those Linux distributions worked on my system, I found Kubuntu the only one that worked consistently. PCLinuxOS KDE is broken; it comes with very bad defaults and they are extremely difficult to change. Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu, so to get KDE, you have to install it from Kubuntu. It isn’t very well integrated with the underlying system, so I wasn’t happy with the results. I tested OpenSUSE, but it doesn’t recognize all of my hardware.

Keep in mind: SUSE is very good at server and uniform corporate desktop stuff, but not so much for the home user. If you use it on a server, it is very easy to configure, since it comes with a GUI tool called YaST that automates most common configuration tasks. However, because the corporate world is their focus, the quality control for common consumer stuff is a little weak. I ran into broken packages and it kept me from performing some tasks. Kubuntu provides a fully integrated experience for the average consumer.

While I don’t believe I’m going to rewrite and republish another edition of my book on it, I am going to post about dealing with Kubuntu in the interest of helping others deal with the inevitable challenges every OS throws at us. All software sucks, but some is more manageable than others. I want to give back to the community of users, and frankly advocate for people to move away from Windows.

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Adjusting Myself

Posted on August 18, 2024 by ehurst

Moral choices I’ve made over the years have consequences.

In my twenties, I was offered a job in business management. It would have kept me from going to church, and at the time, that was more important to me, so I turned that job down. Granted, that company eventually folded, but I would have been quickly hired somewhere else for a job that ignored Christian religion in the same way. I’ve turned down plenty of offers like that over the decades of my life. It meant a loss of economic opportunity for me, but I don’t regret it.

A few blocks from where I live now, the building that once housed Dick’s sporting goods stands empty because the rent surged dramatically when the owner refinanced the property. It happened all over town and lots of Dick’s stores closed at the same time. The former On the Border restaurant also stands empty. Steak-n-Shake is gone, and Panera took over their building because it was bigger than their former location. Where Panera used to be, The Big Biscuit restaurant moved in. For each of these, something changed in their situation to either prosper them or shut them down.

All of it affected me personally and I had no say in the matter. A bicycle I had bought at Dick’s was orphaned from its warranty, unless I was ready to take it twenty miles across town to their warehouse. On the Border shut down because the quality of the food declined dramatically over a couple of months, and people stopped eating there — my wife and I were part of that. Panera gained a bigger clientele when they moved, but they also changed their menu and we stopped eating there. Steak-n-Shake is sorely missed. The biscuit house is way too expensive.

And then I had to go on a low-sodium diet, and can’t eat out much at all. Yes, I could have ignored it and let my high blood pressure kill me slowly — or maybe not. Lots of people live with it. Still, I chose to fight back by dropping my salt intake far below what restaurants are willing to offer. We don’t eat out nearly as much as we used to. It’s not really the money, but we were already discouraged by the inflation and shifts in menu or food quality.

At the same time, the COVID debacle killed a bunch of restaurants. Many never reopened when the mandates ended. That was a limited economic collapse, and quite intentional on the part of our rulers. Locally, some retail stores closed and never came back. Some simply changed hands. I know that I’ve been forced to buy online far more than I really like. Some businesses benefit, while others start to die because of a hundred different pressures on human behavior. I’m just one of millions blown by the winds of fortune.

And yet, I insist that the Creator of the Universe is paying attention to the details of my existence. More, I claim that He communicates with me daily, hourly, even by the minute, on choices I make. Sometimes my choices blend right in with the rest of the world, because my convictions don’t require taking a different path. Even some of my moral choices appear to be part of a much bigger trend. But there are plenty of choices that require me to pull away completely from the masses.

On my bike rides, which include a lot of routes popular with cyclists, I have not seen more than three other folding bikes. None of them were even the same brand (Zizzo), much less the same model (Forte) or even the same color (green). Very few individual users have a dot-matrix printer; it’s almost entirely a commercial printer. If you count by aggregate server logs on the Net, very few individuals run Linux on laptops compared to the vast number that run Windows, and far fewer than Mac laptops. Yes, Android and Chrome OS are Linux, but tightly controlled by a central authority, not endlessly configurable like “real” Linux users.

Each of those choices were taken because of convictions about one thing or another. I avoid sodium, and thus most restaurants, because of convictions. I bought a new laptop because of convictions, and now run Linux (Kubuntu) on it by conviction. I bought a dot-matrix printer because of convictions. I bought a folding bike for the same, and declined high-paying jobs. I dropped out of the military when they begged me to stay. I kept applying to pastor churches when they uniformly turned me away. The end result is not the point.

I keep a stock of canned goods and a pile of paper and pencils when few people do either. No, I don’t see an imminent collapse of the Internet tomorrow. I bought when I did to obey my convictions, which included the certainty that I did not know when I would need them, but I could see them priced low to clear shelves at times. It’s a habit of mind. I’m not disappointed when no emergency comes to justify the habit. I keep doing that kind of thing because my convictions say so. I am obeying the single best source of awareness of God’s will for me. Sometimes it does pan out; sometimes I’ve needed that stuff and had no money to buy. It’s not magical and consistent across the board, but I’m seeking to be consistent internally regardless of the external circumstances.

I see a moral collapse that usually brings about some measure of economic, social and political shift. I see chaos rising, and I’m convinced it is here already. I see more chaos coming, but I’m pretty sure a lot of folks around me won’t see it as a major problem. At least, their actions portray a certain acceptance and adaptation that I can’t copy. I can’t keep making the moral compromises they make. Is it the end of the world? Hardly. That may come later when Earth’s magnetic poles shift dramatically and our planet’s magnetic field drops to the point that we see auroras almost every day in the tropics, while migratory animals get totally lost all over the world.

But the moral collapse is what holds my attention. That other stuff will come eventually, but the moral crisis is already here. It’s hard for me to imagine that God’s covenant people are going to ignore that moral crisis; they keep talking about it even now. I might disagree with them on what I need to do about it, but we all see it. Most of the world doesn’t see it, or at least, they don’t see it as the crisis we do.

Having a bicycle means I am ready to travel a bit without being tracked. Using BMX tires on that bicycle means I can go more places than with conventional road tires. Running Linux on my laptop does the same thing on my Internet surfing (less tracking and more opportunities). Running Linux also means not handing over my computer to an outside agency to control. A dot-matrix printer doesn’t leave microscopic ID tags on the printed product. Being ready to live without a cellphone prepares me for less tracking. Eating out less means there’s less tracking. Stocking up on stuff now means less tracking later when Central Digital Banking blossoms fully. And less tracking means less control, less meddling by humans in my moral choices. There’s a pattern to my behavior that I suspect most people do not see.

Or, more likely, they will misread it. But my God sees my heart and knows me better than I know myself. He’s the one with whom I must keep peace. And He’s the one who makes all of this work out for His glory, and to my benefit. His control is good, right and just. Everyone else’s control is harmful, wrong and evil. He decides what matters, and I do all I can to adjust myself to His wishes.

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NT Doctrine — Hebrews 2

Posted on August 17, 2024 by ehurst

Angels proper have always been spirit beings who served God as warriors and messengers. When they spoke, it was with divine authority, as if it were the voice of God Himself. Without fail, violating His Word brought His wrath, including the words brought by angels. So, we dare not let slip away from us the Word brought by His own Son, the Word in flesh. Was it not marked by signs and wonders, same as every word within the Old Covenant? The gospel shared by the apostles is that Living Word; it’s His message, marked by the same miracles, plus gifts of the Holy Spirit.

When God created the fallen realm, it wasn’t subjected to angels for management. Instead, we have David’s anguished account in Psalm 8 talking about what a wretched situation is our fallen existence. We trashed God’s Word in the Garden; why would God care about us? For the time being, we are below the power of angels. Yet He had planned to elevate us over them and grant us authority over this world. This is a case of “already-but-not-yet” — we were nominated to keep His Garden for Him, but right now we are barely able to survive on par with the animals in the Garden.

So, the writer of Hebrews notes that the nomination was to put us over everything in this world, with no exceptions. Yet, it sure doesn’t look like it right now. Well, Jesus also came down to be with us as a human with less power than angels. But after His resurrection, He now sits crowned on His Father’s right hand. He has experienced what we all face as mortals. His suffering blazed a trail for us to follow. We have the same origin as He if we follow Him.

This grants us the privileges as Christ’s brothers and sisters, as prophesied in Psalm 22 and Isaiah 8. By adopting us as Children of God, we escape the power of death Satan uses to keep us under his authority. Jesus didn’t die for angels, but the children of Abraham. Yes, elsewhere Paul clarified that this refers to the heirs of Abraham’s faith, not his mere DNA. But this letter was written for Hebrew Christians who did have his DNA and his faith.

This meant that Christ could take up the role as High Priest of the New Covenant and made atonement in His own blood. He experienced human temptation and knows how to help us bear up under the strain.

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Your Next Move

Posted on August 16, 2024 by ehurst

We are all heavily influenced by fiction. There have been a great many games, movies and TV shows depicting a nightmare world that simply cannot exist. Americans in particular are deeply taken by horror fiction. None of that stuff is even remotely possible, but we instinctively believe in it as society.

It’s fiction, folks. I know we have an instinct to read it back into the Bible, but the apocalypse prophecies seldom describe sudden catastrophic changes. While those do happen, they are not the dominant characteristic of how God’s wrath works. Jesus warned about the Roman Siege of Jerusalem several decades before it happened, and it should have encouraged His followers to start making plans to migrate out of the city, but too many didn’t.

Basic principle of biblical mysticism: Everything God does in this fallen world is packaged in plausible deniability. God works to capture our hearts, not our minds. The capture of the mind is up to us; it’s our duty to rein in the flesh once He empowers us. Learn to see with your heart, not your five fleshly senses and reason. The senses will lie, both by ignoring the rips in the moral fabric as well as expecting moral consequences to be severe and immediate. God does not spank like a human parent.

I’ve tried to warn about this in the past: The term “economic collapse” seldom matches our fleshly imagination. What it refers to are general trends that reduce the availability of luxuries in the context of what we can afford. It’s not raw prices, but the availability at comparative costs in terms of our labor. Do you realize that most economic collapse goes unnoticed by the people on the ground? They simply adapt and often don’t fully realize what’s happening, because it’s incremental.

We used to go to shopping malls and hang out for hours because that was where we learned about new products at the higher end of hedonistic comfort. Now we look at them online and the malls are closing. It didn’t change our individual comfort level too much, but it meant that folks who worked in the malls now have other jobs, often related to the part of the economy that grew.

Much of what you and I consumed over the past few decades has changed. If you are old enough, you may remember rumbles about off-shoring manufacturing. Everything is made in China, Korea, Indonesia, etc. at much cheaper prices. It was relatively sudden, but it wasn’t literally overnight. Now we are having political conflicts with the countries where that production was moved. Prices are higher for several different reasons. It hasn’t stopped the trade, but it signals a coming shift in what will be available and at what relative cost.

Consider the price of cigarettes. I can recall when people complained that if they ever hit $1.00, they would stop smoking. Those same people are lighting up different brands that aren’t as high quality (and are more toxic) and paying around $5.00 per pack. That’s how it works.

The whole thing is spread across a vast range of products and services. Inflation is pretty high right now, but people resist changing their habits. They will make incremental changes in their consumption without paying much attention. They are conditioned to see it as another inconvenience, in which they are always under siege by invisible powers, and yet their habits have suffered only small, incremental changes.

They are taught to do that. They are taught to define the meaning of the word “problem” in certain ways that exclude them from noticing the evil our rulers are doing. TPTB have been moving the boundaries steadily, slowly, incrementally toward their goals, while hiding it all in plain sight. They have been conditioning our moral sensibilities for more than a century. People two hundred years ago would have risen up in arms over the things we take for granted today.

That’s part of the plan, part of how Satan leads his minions. Most of them don’t even know he’s in charge of their careers. The few who rise to the top do so because they are either catastrophically blind to moral truth or because they have embraced moral depravity. Whatever it takes to keep you on his team, that’s what Satan will offer.

If I really believed a catastrophic collapse was coming all at once, would it have been sane to buy a new car and commit to six years of payments? Do you think I have been ignoring my own words written here on this blog? Don’t read into my warnings the imagery of fiction. We are in a moral decline, and there are certain things that come with that. Most people will never notice. They will keep acting as if nothing has changed.

It is not that the external economic situation forces me to stock up on certain things. It’s that the moral choices I must make will restrict my access to certain goods in the future. Did that not come across?

We are moving to digital currencies; we are almost there. It will enable controls over our economic activity that would shock us right now, but the change will come slowly so as to keep average folks from noticing. Buy certain necessities now before their policies interfere.

Did you notice the mandates to take the vaxx? Have you noticed the mandates that force you to buy “greener” motor vehicles? Have you noticed how some segment of America is now excluded from using the same online services everyone takes for granted? What part of all that noise really matters? How does it matter? Some of the herding is visible, but plenty of it is hidden. It’s a mixture of things that keep you from paying attention to what really matters.

Let me make this more personal. My income is entirely controlled by the federal government. If there was an official divorce of states seceding from federal control, I would lose that income. I’m just one of hundreds of thousands in my own state. Do you think my state government wants to deal with all those federal pensioners in their midst who suddenly have no income at all? No, the state government will try to finesse the situation, seizing back some control without having to formally break from the Union of States. Lots of state governments are thinking about this the same way. It will take some years yet before they are forced to make those hard choices.

But at the same time, the federal policy has made things very painful for individuals. Want to serve in the military? You’ll be forced to endure DEI religion, a form of pagan idolatry. At what point does God say you must stop? It’s on you individually. Daniel had to draw lines that risked his life, yet he served until old age because God wanted him in the government. Joseph engaged in pagan rituals under Pharaoh because God called him to do so, but New Testament Christians refused to toss a pinch of incense on the flames at the imperial shrines to Caesar, and were persecuted for it.

You as an individual will find yourself under convictions that will put you in hard situations. Most of us will pay a heavy price in one way or another, and there will be plenty of specific variations between us as believers. What we should see coming is first and foremost a moral collapse, but that it will echo for each of us in economic and social problems. We will face exclusions that will be catastrophic individually. For us, the whole world has changed. Whether or not it affects the rest of humanity is another issue. They aren’t likely to notice.

Yes, a broad and painful collapse is coming for them, but you and I will feel it in the moral sphere far earlier. Our obedience puts us on the leading edge of what will hit them later. Our challenges will come in waves over the coming years. The reason you need a stock of canned goods, and not a warehouse full, is so you don’t panic when some policy shift forces you to make some hard choices that your non-covenant neighbors don’t have to make. You’ll need some time to see the hand of God clearly, and that stock of canned goods will reduce your human panic. You’ll have room to pray and consider your next move.

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