Cancerous Spite

Posted on January 26, 2025 by ehurst

Kiln of the Soul parish is a covenant community. The Covenant of Christ is everything, and we assert that you cannot fully grasp the Covenant without embracing a Hebraic mental approach. It’s not enough to simply be aware of Christ’s Hebrew background; you must absorb it. The message of Jesus Christ came within that frame of reference, and it results in a radically different outlook from what is common in the West in general, and America in particular. You cannot keep the Covenant of Christ without committing yourself to the task of changing how you think.

The gospel is not a body of ideas; it is not data. You cannot process it intellectually. It is a Person. You must make Him Lord and exercise your faith from your heart, not from your head. Jesus was a Hebrew mystic; serving Him requires a mystical approach. You measure all things by your ongoing personal relationship with Him. He speaks to you through the moral consciousness of your heart, not through your head.

So, when someone asks me a question about Vox Day, the response is not based on intellectual evaluation. Human intellect is invariably seduced by self-serving motivations, consciously or not. Vox is a prime example of that. It’s not a question of his intellectual talent, but that everything he uses that talent for is self-serving. He does not serve Christ.

I made it a point to warn him about this way back when he allowed comments on his blog. Some of his readers understood and agreed with it, but Vox never bothered to respond. He continues to this day building an algorithm of life that rests entirely on intellectual talent, a talent that never ceases to serve his fleshly nature. His religion does not stand on the kind of faith that takes up the Cross, but on pure logic.

People of faith do not exhibit the bitter hatred Vox does. It’s one thing to relay to the world a public denunciation of sin; that has always come with a call to repentance and an offer to work for rehabilitation. The prophet’s mission is not a drive-by shooting of condemnation alone. Jesus has always welcomed sinners home, and said quite bluntly that this is how we are supposed to operate in His name.

It’s not that Vox can’t understand; he refuses to walk by the heart and spirit. He consistently turns away from the gospel message of redemption, and the bulk of his effort is condemnation. That’s how Satan does business.

I’ll give an example: His Socio-sexual hierarchy is not biblical at all, but an artifact of western culture. You can try to force it to fit into non-western cultures, but it misses the whole point. Our Lord does not make people that way; they get that way from being exposed to the pagan western culture. Vox ginned up the notion of the Sigma Male for himself as an excuse to avoid doing things the way Christ taught us. It is the ultimate excuse to avoid carrying the Cross. Christ calls us to get directly involved.

The ideal man of God is a shepherd. Vox’s system insists that only Alphas can do that, which is utterly false. God’s Word says every man must find a path to the shepherd role using whatever talents God has granted him. One does not seek the role of shepherd; it is thrust upon you when God decides it is your time. You prepare for that faithfully through the process of pursuing His Word and seeking a direct conscious connection to Him. How can I please You, Lord?

But because of his moral vacuity, Vox refuses to take responsibility when God places him in that role. He is in that position, but refuses to embrace the moral demands that come with it. Instead, he plunders it for his personal gain. This is precisely the sin of Satan and his allies on the Divine Council. He does not take upon himself the burden Christ assumed when people crowded around Him.

I don’t read Vox these days; his intellectual brilliance serves no valid moral purpose. There is no hope of glory in his words. His acid spite for inconvenient people is cancerous and can easily lead you astray from Christ’s ways. He does not invest his talents back into the covenant, the community of faith. He has no spiritual covering, and I pray he repents before destruction falls on him.

In case you are wondering, I have no particular interest in having him join our parish. That’s not what this is about. He should build his own fellowship that testifies to the world of the power and grace of our Lord, not his fleshly interests.

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NT Doctrine — 2 Peter 3

Posted on January 25, 2025 by ehurst

Peter wanted his readers to keep their minds in subjection to the Spirit. We inform the brain of divine revelation so it will know how to respond, equipped to cooperate with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Teaching was aimed at locking down the boundaries for the fleshly nature. One of the tricks of these Gnostic heretics was to reason that Christ was not coming back. Has anything changed since Creation? Yes, it has.

Peter recites the Creation story, and it should be obvious he is dictating this letter in Hebrew to someone translating it into Greek, because the wording is sometimes clumsy. He says the Gnostics know they are lying about the return of Christ. Genesis portrays how dry land appeared below the watery canopy of the sky and rose up out of the sea of waters to drain off. So, it wasn’t very hard for God to then destroy the world with all that same water that was held back by His hand. After the Flood, He changed the physical structure of the world so that water would not be used again that way.

We no longer have that exceedingly wet situation from before the Flood. Now, the Lord has promised that the next destruction will come by fire instead of water and it won’t be just the earth. That will be the Day of Judgment. Peter reminds them of one more hole in the Gnostic argument: God is not under the time-space constraints because He lives in Eternity. His attention decides whether the passage of time is for Him slow or fast. The false image of God being slow misses the whole point. Noah’s prophetic warning of a flood coming took 120 years while he built the Ark. Was that too long? God was being patient, giving the rest of humanity a full chance to repent and gave Noah time to finish that massive boat.

Don’t misread verse 9 like the Calvinists and Arminians do. It’s Hebrew thoughts in Greek words: God is not eager to destroy anyone, but He has warned that the time for such a burdensome task does eventually come. And when that day comes, it will not seem to make sense to anyone but Him. There will be nothing about the situation to warn anyone. However, no one will miss it. The noise will be horrific when the physical universe passes away. More to the point, every human deed will be exposed for all to see.

Let’s be clear: One does not take a vacation from holiness. Stay on top of your Kingdom mission. Peter repeats the image of how the universe will be destroyed. God will remove His restraining hand and the molecular bonds of all the particles in the universe will dissolve so that all the stored energy will be released at once. You cannot imagine the fiery storm!

There will be a new heavens and earth that we also cannot imagine, but one without mortality and the damage done by the rebellions of creatures God made. Our duty now is to make ready for that day. Realize that God’s patience about judging your suffering and sorrow is good for you, too. You have more time to discover ways you could serve Christ better. This is the same kind of thing that shows up in Paul’s letters; he and Peter were on the same team. Because Paul was fluent in Greek, his writings are a lot more challenging to read.

And, quite naturally, the Gnostic heretics have twisted his letters, same as they do all the rest of the Scriptures. Yes, Peter says that Paul’s letters were Scripture. By this time Paul had already been executed and Peter was next. The Apostles recognized Scripture when they saw it. And Peter asked his readers to invest the time and effort to lock in a clear doctrine of Christ so they could stand against the lies of the Gnostic heretics.

The only real “gnosis” was in Christ and His teaching.

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Marriage and Tribulation Norming

Posted on January 23, 2025 by ehurst

We’ve already made clear that Jack’s blog is part of our Radix Fidem community. Jack is family.

One of the most important messages coming out of his blog is the catastrophic destruction wreaked by western feminism. What we have now in the West in general, and America in particular, is that the majority of females are no longer capable of marriage. Depending on where you live, men will not find any woman worth dating, much less starting a serious romance.

Women have been trained to become materialistic and self-centered, to regard themselves as goddesses for whom even the slightest measure of restraint is sacrilegious. I’m not referring to the social pretenses; that is also under their control. Rather, their actual behavior behind the scenes is insufferably arrogant and self-indulgent. As a social generality, something like 80% of all women are pursuing the top 10% of males. Even very mediocre women feel they deserve the attention of the socially elite males. Men who somehow fail to hit that 10% elite status get no attention at all until a woman has passed her prime, having ridden the casual sex carousel and burned out on romance.

Meanwhile, women are urged to avoid doing anything that makes them actually attractive to men seeking a serious life partner. Instead, women are trained to seduce some fellow with a decent income, have a few kids, only to them perform a divorce rape out of a sense of entitlement when she gets bored. These women have abused the court system, infiltrating it from top to bottom with their foul doctrines, until that entitlement is enshrined into law in every state.

In other words, American men are getting a raw deal in the romance and marriage market because there are no women worth having. The risks are so high that, even in purely secular terms, it is an unreasonable proposition to seek romance among American women. The rarity of someone like my wife is why we have the nickname “unicorns” for covenant women.

Paul wrote that, in his day and time, it was wise to avoid romance for a different set of reasons (1 Corinthians 7). He was single. My point is that there are cycles in civilization that affect all men, but that those who seek to walk in the Covenant are especially challenged from time to time on the issue of romance.

On the one hand, we can agree that building a Covenant life includes a very strong expectation of having families. On the other hand, that was never anything more than symbolism of something deeper. The Kingdom of Christ grows through spiritual birth, not physical birth. Jesus made the emphasis clear in His visit with Nicodemas.

Churches must begin to pay attention to this. The mainstream has become quite hostile to singles, because the mainstream is worldly and shallow. With Paul, being single was promoted as the norm in times of persecution and tribulation. What kind of “church programming” would have existed under Paul’s leadership, compared to what is commonly seen in American churches these days?

We need to pray and think about this, because while having stable covenant families remains the ideal, what is actually normal in context is something else entirely. A so-called “singles ministry” should not become a bogus matchmaking machine, as if being single is a problem. Singles should not be treated as lesser members. They should be cultivated for, and integrated into, leadership. Marital status should not be a test of fitness for calling and mission. There are high moral standards for either case.

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We Accept the Challenge

Posted on January 22, 2025 by ehurst

There is a huge difference between our western viewpoint and that of the Bible. It manifests in one primary flaw: the notion that our democratic expectations came from God. The notion of fairness and equality is from Hell, not from Heaven. The Bible flatly says that God plays favorites, and that the majority of humanity will not be welcomed into His Presence. Nor is the Bible itself a democratic document. Not only does God make it opaque to those outside His family, but even those inside His family must work for a clear understanding.

God did not create this vast difference between us and our Savior. We did. We did it by cooperating with the Devil’s agenda in shifting human culture away from God’s chosen means of revelation. Divine revelation came within a nation and culture that even the nation itself eventually abandoned.

The whole point of revelation on Mount Sinai was to build a culture for walking in the image of God. The key element was never a matter of how to prosper in this world, but to keep that image alive. God wants people to look like His family. He promises to provide the means to do that. Everything else is strictly secondary. The core issue is not what God grants us, but what He demands of us.

The Kiln of the Soul parish aims to heed His call to that image. It was meant to be the primary mission of Israel, but they got it backwards. They twisted it into a commitment to their own primacy over the rest of humanity. Instead of calling the world to serve God, they demanded that the world serve their worldly comfort. Jesus came to call His nation back to their divine mission, but they refused and killed Him to emphasize their refusal. Jesus turned that rejection on its head, restoring through Himself the path for anyone in the world to join in being the image of God.

Following Christ is not merely an individual choice. It is the call to join a community under His Covenant. His personal statement about His law at the Last Supper was inherently communal in nature. That covenant is fundamentally feudal; democracy and the pretense of objectivity was dreamed up by Satan to distract us from the Covenant. We are building His Kingdom, a kingdom of hearts.

It’s a long path that has over time gotten longer. The same Lucifer that deceived humanity in the first place has not ceased to deceive us. He has built up any number of strongholds to keep us in thrall to his folly. Scripture portrays the magnitude of the task of building and maintaining the structure of God’s image in us. The idea that a surface reading of the Bible in your native tongue is enough to make you into God’s image is not even in the Bible itself. The Scriptures portray a grand endeavor of discerning and embracing a whole different culture, an epic task because we are so very far where Christ stands.

It does not require a degree, but it does require study. And the task is made difficult because the people who should be our allies keep turning out to be enemies. Church people are so busy building their human institutions that they pervert the educational process itself. When God calls out from the church people to build a better representation of Himself, the whole establishment fights it.

Kiln of the Soul parish accepts the challenge.

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2000 Years of Drift

Posted on January 21, 2025 by ehurst

I turn once again to the matter of vision: What is Kiln of the Soul parish all about?

There is no way to summarize that in a single document, much less a single statement, as if we are somehow obliged to come up with a marketing brochure. The most important thing you’ll know about Kiln of the Soul are the people. We are the outreach simply by how we conduct ourselves in our lives.

Shaping that conduct is the teaching, starting with the Radix Fidem path and moving then to how it is applied by the elders in Kiln of the Soul parish. The elders’ vision includes a lot of things; we are elders because we invest ourselves in this mission. We are specialists in varying degrees, trying our best to absorb ourselves in the revelation of Christ. The reason it takes so much work is because Americans start out so very far from the ideal.

In the last 2000 years since Christ lived, died and rose again the world has drifted very, very far from things He was able to take for granted in sharing His message. His own nation had drifted far enough as it was, but the powers of this fallen world have driven it farther than most humans can imagine.

And part of that long migration away from Christ includes the very false assumption that where mainstream churchianity now stands is where following Christ has brought us. An expression of that delusion was the statement someone made once that following Christ shouldn’t require much of a specialized education, just read the Bible. This is a common contention that our English translations are adequate to express what Jesus was teaching.

The result is a vast horde of silly nonsense about Jesus, even to the point people actively resist and silence any effort to recover the frame of reference Jesus had as a Hebrew man among Hebrew people. The scholarship of grasping the radical difference between Hebrew thinking in the Bible versus American thinking today is why God calls elders and scholars to study these things. That scholarship is supposed to filter down from the specialists. Otherwise, there can be no body of Christ.

That last sentence riles a lot of American believers. They act as if Christ and His followers spoke English. They turn the Bible into a book of magic, trying to memorize the words, but never understanding what’s behind those words. They get to know a false image of Christ and defend that false image to the point they would easily crucify Him again, same as His government did for much the same reason. Judaism is a long-term drift away from the God Jews claim is theirs. They had redefined Him to the point they didn’t even recognize His Son. America has come to that place again.

Do you see our governments and our civilization fading and crumbling? Those things cannot stand because they are hostile to Christ in one way or another. It’s all owned by the Devil from the very beginning, reflecting his deception. Those things cannot stand.

We are striving to find a place to stand for Him in a hostile world. The effort to build a deep scholarship about thinking like God’s Hebrew Son is not aimed at blocking out people, but painting a clear picture of who He is and how to walk with Him. The only people outside the boundaries are those who refuse to come inside, people who demand that Christ shed His divine identity and meet them on their own terms. That won’t happen.

He is the Lord; you are not.

And we have infinite confidence in His power and leadership. The way we see it, if you truly submit to Him from the heart, He will eventually lead you to the same place we stand. It’s where He has led us and a lot of other folks out there. You aren’t required to agree with us, but we are all required to agree with Him. All we can do is faithfully discern with whom we should fellowship.

Here’s the bottom line: Just bow at Jesus’ feet. Make Him Lord; give Him your ultimate allegiance. Get the idea that you will need to nail your fleshly nature to the Cross, same as He did. He didn’t need that for Himself, but for us. We don’t mimic the literal action, but it symbolizes what we do internally by forsaking this world and it’s concerns, and embracing His divine concerns.

If you can do that, we have full confidence you will eventually end up on pretty much the same path as ours. Or, you can save time and hang out with us long enough to get some idea what we are doing. Even if the details are not for you, we are convinced you will find inspiration to chase the Lord back through that 2000 years of drift until you are walking with Him again.

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And the Lord’s Supper?

Posted on January 19, 2025 by ehurst

It’s the same drill as the post for Friday when we talk about the Lord’s Supper or Communion: I defer to Heiser’s analysis to ask the right questions and clarify the Bible passages most people refer to for the ritual.

  1. The Lord’s Supper and the Gospels, Part 1
  2. The Lord’s Supper and the Gospels, Part 2
  3. The Lord’s Supper and 1 Corinthians 8-11, Part 1
  4. The Lord’s Supper and 1 Corinthians 8-11, Part 2

The substance is that Jesus said we were to celebrate Him, and we do that best by observing what He said at the Last Supper in declaring His One Law: Love each other as He loves us. Everything Paul wrote about it reinforces this concept. The whole point is that this form of communion ritual must be communion in the Holy Spirit.

Historical evidence indicates that most early churches engaged in a love feast in conjunction with the communion ritual. It’s obvious that Corinth did based on Paul’s letters. A love feast is based on the Old Testament observance in which those who had plenty always brought extra and made it a point to share with those who didn’t. Nobody went away empty, and everyone had enough wine or other celebratory beverage to be joyful (i.e., buzzed but not drunk).

There are people who shouldn’t consume alcoholic beverages, to include recovering alcoholics and folks taking certain meds (like me). However, the whole temperance movement was actually a British middle-class thing that started in England under the guise of left-wing militant religious groups like the Salvation Army and some Baptists. You didn’t know that the today’s Baptists were rooted in social leftism? Temperance is most definitely not biblical. I’m fine with serving wine at communion.

Indeed, just about any combination of grain/bread and fermented beverage is fine. Jesus selected from the traditional Seder meal wine and unleavened bread. If you grow up in Iowa, maybe cornbread and apple cider fit better. (Hold the salt on mine; I have to live with a low-sodium diet.) The point was never the food itself, but the participation with God and His family household.

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NT Doctrine — 2 Peter 2

Posted on January 18, 2025 by ehurst

Peter describes the state of the Gnostic heresy as it was at the time. Israel had to contend with false prophets and so will the churches. They infiltrated and brought their false teaching into every church they could find. Things had drifted to the point they were even denying Christ Himself, the Lord who sacrificed His life to purchase them from slavery to the flesh. While many of them bore a strong charisma, they were morally wretched and self-serving. In due time, God would pour out His wrath on them.

Peter is confident that God’s wrath would not fail. The fallen elohim did not escape the Abyss, and their foul progeny — the Nephilim — did not escape dying in the Flood. Meanwhile, God kept Noah and his household alive. Just so, when the time was ripe, Sodom and Gomorrah were buried under volcanic ash while Lot’s household was preserved. Peter notes how Lot was tormented by the depravity of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Thus, those who indulge the flesh will be destroyed, while those who seek God’s favor will find it, despite their trials and sorrows. These filthy Gnostics even went so far as to insult the powers of the Unseen Realm. Contrast that to the angels of God who were very careful how they addressed these higher authorities in the Lord’s name. The arrogant Gnostics were just begging for wrath. They had invested a lot of effort in learning how to prey on unsuspecting church folks.

They followed the teaching of Balaam. That ancient scholar was a genuine expert in what God had revealed up to that point but was motivated by personal greed to use that knowledge for evil. It took an onager speaking with a human voice to correct him and awaken humility. These Gnostics were no better than dry springs or clouds without rain, promising blessings they could not deliver. Their message claims to deliver the pagans from sorrow, but once they make a convert, he’s only worse off. They rant on and on about freedom while walking in slavery to their fleshly lusts.

Finally, Peter makes it clear that these filthy men were once followers of Christ. Having climbed up the mountain of God’s Presence, they have slipped to a place far below where they started. They learned the truth only to corrupt it and abuse its power, traitors who knowingly turned to Darkness. Peter offers two parables showing how disgusting these creatures are: dogs returning to eat again their own vomit, and pigs who went to the trouble to bathe only to immediately return to the smelly filth.

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What about Baptism?

Posted on January 17, 2025 by ehurst

We’ve talked about baptism before. Up to now, I’ve avoided trying to nail down the particulars. Over the years I’ve been influenced by several different traditions, and I played along with whatever was the practice of the church I attended. But, having no occasion to perform any such rituals, there was no need to settle on any particular answers to common questions. I never felt it mattered how or when one performed it, only that it be done.

I’ve never encountered a better balanced examination than the one Heiser offered way back some years ago when he first began his “Naked Bible Podcast” program. In ten short audio recordings, he covers the various questions and angles without telling you where you must land. Rather, he lays out his thesis that you must start with Colossians 2:11-12 where Paul says that circumcision and baptism are roughly equivalent. Recognize that whatever we say about baptism in the New Covenant must connect to what we can say about circumcision in the Old Covenant.

I’ll link directly to his archive of audio recordings:

  1. Baptism: What You Know May Not Be So
  2. Baptism: Contradictions in Creeds Part 1
  3. Baptism: Contradictions in Creeds Part 2
  4. Baptism: Contradictions in Creeds Part 3
  5. Baptism, Circumcision, and Biblical Theology
  6. Applying the Baptism – Circumcision Theology to Adult or Believer’s Baptism
  7. The Mode of Baptism and the Biblical Text
  8. Baptism & Problem Passages: 1 Peter 3:14-22
  9. Baptism & Problem Passages: Acts 22:16
  10. Baptism & Problem Passages: Acts 2:38

You can also find them on YouTube, if you prefer, by going to this page and laboriously scrolling down until you get to the bottom showing the first ten episodes.

The bottom line is that baptism marks the entrance into the covenant community where the Word of God resides. It doesn’t solve anything except your membership; it’s just a ritual of allegiance to Christ as Lord. It still depends on your heart-led choice to follow the teaching of that community and stand in God’s favor.

So, let the elder of the community decide the particulars. I see no particular point in re-baptizing except when someone feels the need personally. For people with no church background, I prefer believer’s baptism by full immersion, if possible, but I’m flexible. I would baptize your children if you commit to teaching them the Word (i.e., homeschooling, etc.). My personal preferences are not applicable outside of my covering.

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Ghosts, Poltergeists and Nature

Posted on January 13, 2025 by ehurst

It’s not merely that humans are fallen. Heiser talks about the Three Rebellions of God’s elohim staff: the Fall, the great corruption through the Nephilim, and the deception and idolatry after the Tower of Babel. Humans are in a bad way, and in desperate need of redemption from the effects of all three.

Each of these Three Rebellions has put us farther and farther away from Eden and our native place in Creation. We are separated from our God’s design and our rightful condition. We live in a world that is hostile to what we have become, instead of responsive to our management. We don’t understand it fully and must fight manually for what little we get from it. And what we get isn’t worth very much because it’s tainted by sin.

Creation in general, and the natural world around us in particular, is not fallen. It is also not passive and neutral. We have taught on this blog for many years that nature is alive, sentient and willful (in a certain sense). Satan and his allies do not have any control over the natural world that is not available to us, if we choose to understand and exercise the authority God gave us in the Garden. Granted, the authority we exercise in our current condition is limited, but it’s way more than what is commonly imagined in western mythology.

Jesus lived among us in our fallen condition, but without the moral taint of the Three Rebellions. He wasn’t in His eternal form; He was constrained by our mortal condition, but manifested what we could be with redemption. He lived in the condition we could gain if we embrace His teaching. Thus, He walked on water, calmed the storms, healed the sick and delivered captives. He flatly said that we could do things like that if we follow Him. He also said that His authority would not answer our whims and curiosities and desires, but would answer to the purpose and message of His Father.

The full range of His teaching is not explicitly stated in the Gospels; the authors themselves warned of that. Rather, His teaching references a wealth of what was signaled indirectly in the Old Testament. Ultimate truth cannot be stated in dry clinical terms. It cannot be contained and circumscribed by words. Truth is not propositional; it is personal. Truth is another name for the Person of our Creator and His Son. Thus, the teaching of Jesus opens a door to the privileges we lost in the Three Rebellions.

Creation is also a Person, a manifestation of His Word. God imbued it with His own Person and character. It responds to His will. If we walk in His will, it is our best ally. It knows His will and cooperates willingly. When the Nephilim walked on this earth, they taught all of the ways of Creation’s activities, but denied the power and will of God. Creation does a lot of things simply because of its nature; it has habits and instincts. You can fail to understand the divine purpose, but still have some limited access to ways of manipulating the natural world (“magic”).

Thus, we would end up using the limited authority of the rebel elohim and the disembodied Nephilim spirits (AKA, demons). That authority is quite substantial, but it does not match that of Christ. Their authority can deceive and destroy; it cannot build. They don’t own the natural world, but they do understand it a lot better than we can with our senses.

If you enter into the Covenant of Christ, the authority available to you trumps theirs. Given our situation here in America, I warn that it requires you consciously submit to Christ as your feudal master, making Him Lord. That includes entering into a covenant community and embracing the tribal feudalism inherent in Creation itself. But the main point is that you be in a community of faith, because that’s where divine authority resides. You cannot access divine authority outside of that situation.

Do you understand that so-called ghosts and poltergeists are simply manifestations of how the natural world operates? They are not specifically demonic. They can be used to manipulate us if we don’t understand them, and that’s the point of telling you that they are normal phenomena.

When a human dies, their spirit leaves their body and this world. They do not hang around. However, the natural world may for various reasons remember their presence. In certain locations and under certain conditions you may encounter a resonance of the person manifested by the memories held within the natural world. They do this as a function of God’s divine purpose in addressing our moral situation, about His wrath and our need for redemption. This is one of the ways that Creation speaks His truth. The lingering sorrows of humans are manifested as if those humans were still present. And sometimes the physical elements may act on their own accord to seek our attention to these things (“poltergeists”). They are simply acting on their designed nature.

If you get spooked, it’s part of the same deception that caused Adam and Eve to hide from God in the Garden. They instinctively feared the wrath of God on their sins. They knew they had elements in their lives that required covering, and their covering was gone. It was gone because they surrendered to the authority of Lucifer, and he offers no covering at all. Thus, people who face these normal operations of the natural world are typically fearful of them. They can represent the wrath of God on whatever caused the sorrow that still resonates in that context.

Those things could hurt us if we are not covered. If we operate under the authority of Lucifer — the entire realm of human activity outside the Covenant — then we have no protection from the natural world. Creation is not our ally but our enemy. [Edit: Demons can also masquerade as ghosts and poltergeists, but with the Holy Spirit’s Presence, you’ll know the difference.]

The only way to escape the authority of Lucifer and his friends is to submit to the authority of the One who created all these things. The key to “miracles” in which the natural world is our ally is that we operate according to the authority and message of Christ. He said the simplest statement of His authority and message was in the command that we should love each other as He does. That means forming a covenant community.

From within that context, we are allowed to know instinctively what His will and message should be in any given context. We then can exercise one or more gifts that He grants to the community and message of the Covenant. You can live for the Covenant or you can live for the Devil; there are no other options for humans.

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NT Doctrine — 2 Peter 1

Posted on January 11, 2025 by ehurst

The final chapter of 1 Peter contains admonition on practical matters but no doctrine. This second letter from Peter is to the same audience a couple of years later, near the end of Nero’s reign. Things have gotten worse for the Hebrew Christians in the Roman provinces along the Black Sea coasts of Asia Minor.

By now, the Judaizers had shifted their campaign. The old Talmudic law was passe, so a new crop of charismatic proto-Gnostics was making the rounds. Their doctrine sounded new, but it was simply an excuse for even greater moral depravity. This was the birth of, “Since the flesh is irreparably fallen, let it do what it wants. It won’t affect your salvation. Just keep your head on straight.” These men lived and promoted dissolute lives. This teaching served to completely dismantle the whole concept of living in this world by the power of the Spirit over the flesh.

He offers what we could call a chain of logic beginning with his greeting, proclaiming himself a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ (personally appointed while Jesus was still alive). But his audience had the same faith that propelled Peter’s ministry, made available to them because the righteous obedience of Jesus paid the price. Peter prays they continue finding more grace and peace with God by what they were learning about the Son. This is a subtle reference to learning the painful lesson of holiness in the face of persecution.

Peter has confidence this prayer is not pointless because he is quite certain that Christ won for us a generous supply of everything His followers need to walk in this world with a strong testimony of righteousness. We are called into Christ’s inner circle of disciples, privileged to receive the inside knowledge reserved for those who were nominated to experience a revelation of His glory and greatness. That selection further inducts us into a household of great wealth promised to those who participate in His divine nature. This means we have escaped the prison of the fleshly lusts.

But it’s not enough to simply get the concept. Your commitment should empower a diligent training of your will to seek the greatness of our Lord’s name, which opens the door to the real gnosis those liars keep talking about. True gnosis yields self-discipline, which in turn brings cheerful endurance in persecution, which in turn promotes a morally clean life, brotherly affection and sacrificial love.

That we should improve in these ways makes us very fruitful in drawing closer to Christ. Notice the drift here: Christ is the personal manifestation of our Creator, and anything that resembles a deeper acquaintance with Him results in a disciplined holy conduct in the flesh. This is a very plain counter to Gnosticism.

If you can’t grasp this necessity of holiness, what’s the point of personal spiritual redemption? What happened to being cleansed of the sins of the flesh? We should be diligent to prove by our holy walk that we are the Elect of Christ. If you seek holiness by His power, the whole point is not to stumble back into the sins of the flesh. You don’t defeat the flesh by surrendering to it.

Peter’s demise is very close, but as long as he yet lives, it is his duty to remind every believer of these things. Peter also planned on leaving a body of written material that would keep preaching his message after he was gone. He never forgot the warning Jesus gave him about how He would die, and it was obvious that was coming quite soon. Yes, Peter was a firsthand eyewitness to everything he claimed about Jesus. None of his teaching was dreamed up by human speculation. Unlike the Gnostics, Peter knew what he was talking about, and it wasn’t that hard to understand.

He never forgot that day God’s voice thundered from Heaven affirming that Jesus was His Son and His delight. It was up on that mountainside where Jesus was transformed into His eternal form. The gift of prophecy the Lord gave to Peter turned out to be utterly reliable. If nothing else, his readers could trust his message like a lighthouse in a fog, until the Day of the Lord itself dawns, and they see Him face to face. Meanwhile, the voice of prophecy never comes from a prophet’s own imagination but is the voice of God.

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