Partisan Church Politics

Posted on January 20, 2023 by ehurst

I confess that I belong to a partisan movement within Church History.

I’ve shared this on the forum. I promote the shepherd image of church leadership, and the relative independence of lay people. The flock is the whole point. What I shared in that post on the forum is some of the history of this movement. I’ve added a few words in brackets here:

At the end of WW2, our nation’s leaders had an industrial policy. The process of organizing and mobilizing for war had very good effects on the economy and our living standards in general. At least some of those leaders felt it was a good idea to take advantage of that bureaucracy to encourage veterans returning from war to go to college. It was a massive project that exploded the population involved in academics in the US. The colleges and universities could not keep up with the demand for seats in classes.

While it’s well established that our nation’s elite were hoping to turn the population into very productive drones who were motivated by their own rising standard of living, [most of] the colleges up that point were still rather honestly academic, and all these working class guys suddenly got exposed to serious intellectual pursuits. The result was an explosion in creativity that was not constrained by the elites. It took them another generation to get it all back under control. We can trace the dumbing-down of college education starting in the 1960s. The [hijacked] civil rights movement was partly a cover for that “correction”. The natural rise in yearning among minorities who were getting real educations was seized by the communists as a way to force changes in our society and government.

Meanwhile, that sudden rise in people getting real educations opened doors among the American evangelical clergy. A part of this was the rise of lay ministries [not just filling staff positions]. There was a strong move in some circles to actually cultivate such a thing. This movement viewed clergy primarily as equippers, not simply leaders. A host of strong educational books were published to put some measure of theological and biblical expertise in the hands of the lay public. The idea was to engage the lay members in ways that got more of them involved in sharing their faith without the silly old door-to-door canvasing operations. Thinkers were looking for ways to broaden the concept of outreach so that any individual member could discover their unique faith and mission calling, and have support to practice it.

If you never heard about this move, which came out most strongly in the late 1960s-1980s, I’m not surprised. I was there, and I felt like it was being squelched from all directions. I ran across it quite by accident, and discovered a huge number of churches trying to get this thing going, and nary a peep was heard from church staff [i.e., denominational] news sources. The established elite were against it from the start.

Thus, the movement represented by the book The Purpose Driven Life was actually meant to stop the earlier lay ministry movement. The same with “Seeker Sensitive” and some other trendy terms that burst on the scene in the 1990s. All of it was a mask covering a behind-the-scenes movement among leaders to learn how to assert a more centralized control over church operations that turned the membership into passive idiots who waited for the leaders to decide everything. In small newsletters and exposés you could read the horror stories of how the leadership training that came with those “Forty Days of Purpose” programs specifically called for kicking out lay leaders and destroying anything they had built.

Notice that I start the story with WW2, but it’s actually much older; it goes all the way back to Old Testament times. A critical element in the Pharisaical agenda in the Jewish nation that developed before Jesus was born was the rabbinical contempt for the common folks. The peasants were kept out of Talmudic discussions. They were to be taxed and milked, but were unfit to so much as make suggestions. The Pharisees strove to inject this into churches as part of their Judaizing efforts.

Once the church leaders accepted this notion, it has never stopped. The people must be oppressed and kept in their place. I’ve always been against that, and in retrospect, I now know this was the main reason I was marginalized among my fellow preachers. I often espoused the idea of training and motivating laymen to develop their own outreach ideas in the church. It never got anywhere.

At any rate, the backlash against this movement is currently what we see in church politics across the whole range of evangelical organizations.

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Leaving the Herd 05

Posted on January 19, 2023 by ehurst

We need to make some distinctions before I end this series.

The individualism of the West is a very poor match for biblical self-reliance. The former arises from the challenge of survival that became an inherited trait of in the wintery northern Europe. An atomized society like that of white people in northern Europe is just a survival tactic, not a moral value of Scripture. Don’t confuse that with the individual spiritual responsibility. Believers are supposed to have a much higher emotional engagement than is normal for northern European whites.

It’s important to have God-ordained shepherds; I’ve made much of the shepherd ideal on this blog and all that goes into it. But the Bible has hammered home the utter necessity of being able to operate in faith when you are utterly alone in a world of idolaters. There is a clear, yet unspoken, necessity behind the image of biblical leadership: Like every family household, the faith community will always drag around some portion of membership that is not spiritually motivated. Also, the bulk of any community will be compose of people who are still working on it. The existence of an expressed law code and social order is for those who do not walk in the power of grace on any given issue. Shepherd leadership is fatherly and flexible according to individual need.

The organization is familial and organic to living itself, not rules based. It is based on the problems we all have with a fallen nature, and a holy desire to escape it.

Despite how people misread the meaning of the words (such as Hebrews 10:25), God does not require you to join one or another organized religious institution. Fellowship is a divine mandate, but the institution is not. Fellowship is simply unavoidable in the long term. Sooner or later your faithful adherence to the Covenant will miraculously draw other people of faith. The only question is how much fellowship you can have with the other folks involved. It’s not all or nothing. The spiritual and moral discipline is not in reporting to a religious organization that is duly authorized by some human agency, in which you surrender all your convictions at the dictate of mere men claiming divine authority. God does not sponsor organizing in a way that squelches your spiritual gifts and sense of calling and mission.

God did not ordain a single existing religious institution in existence today. All of them are man made. What God did institute is the extended family household ruled by faith in Him. We are drawn to the Lord and His family.

Fellowship is a divine gift, not something humans can generate and regulate by their human capabilities. We should learn to recognize the difference between what makes us comfortable with others versus what God actually requires. By the same token, the image of an organization that can work in a cosmopolitan mixture is contrary to the Bible. You’ll note that our summary of Biblical Law is really pretty lightweight. It’s not offered as a prescription, but as one model of how we look at things here in our Radix Fidem community. We don’t prescribe; we merely suggest.

You should not tolerate prescription. If you are moved by faith, then it’s just a matter of creating a space where you can find support for your faith. Some of those promised covenant blessings cannot be realized without a community. But community is the goal, not the fundamental necessity.

Furthermore, community is the only goal in this life; it is the whole goal. Churches aren’t supposed to do anything. They simply exist; their purpose is fellowship and community — nothing more. They are places where we each sharpen the individual grasp on conviction within the matrix of community. That’s the whole purpose. Whether the community grows larger or comes apart is not in our hands; it is not our direct concern. Rather, it rests in the hands of God. Whether or not you have fellowship is partly reward for faithfulness and partly context.

In our context, fellowship is sparse at best. We live in a world that honestly believes the lie that grace and law are enemies. God’s revelation of covenant law is grace. That passage in Romans 6 does not set grace and law against each other, but sets grace as the end goal of law. Law teaches you what peace with God looks like. Whether or not your heart awakens from the law, and through the law, is another matter.

There is much the Bible simply assumes without stating because it was written by people with broadly shared assumptions. We don’t share those assumptions; we have our own. If you don’t exchange your assumptions for theirs, you will not understand what they wrote. How hard is that to understand? What a western education and culture tries to hide from you is that the West was not God’s idea, and it is hardly the only valid approach to understanding things. The West takes itself entirely too seriously (among other sins).

The West has no concept of tribal feudalism, of the shepherd patriarchy, and the utter necessity of decentralized family-centered polity. The West cannot imagine the particular Hebrew balance between the individual and society. These things are assumed in the text of Scripture, and utterly foreign to the western mind. But even when we can get people up to a good level of scholarship about these things, we still have this vast mountain to climb of getting people to reject the western view of life as inherently wrong. People struggle mightily with the idea that the Hebrew viewpoint is God’s viewpoint, and His divine will for the entire human race.

You cannot obey the will of God, you cannot walk in the covenant of His Son, without leaving the western viewpoint behind, and embracing the Hebrew outlook. This is the monumental task that churches should be engaging. The western concepts of organizing and leading people are all flatly wrong. Western churches are herding cattle, not pastoring the sheep of His pasture.

Stop being a cow. Leave the herd and join the flock.

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Leaving the Herd 04

Posted on January 18, 2023 by ehurst

Part 1 of this series provided a foundation and overview. Part 2 outlines the essential elements of mysticism in faith. Part 3 warns about the incompatibilities of faith with mainstream Christian religion.

I’m not suggesting church people do not have faith. Rather, they don’t understand faith and how it works. They suffer from faith that is saturated with a cultural milieu that they aren’t ready to leave behind in pursuit of the Great Commission. This is not the place to trace down a detailed history of how we got to this mess, but you probably realize that most of the current American evangelical religion comes from the influence of the Enlightenment.

That’s not to say there was no flaw in the Reformation or the Roman Church before that. The Reformation and Enlightenment were each a reaction to what came before, but the Roman Church simply left behind the Hebrew roots of New Testament faith. The traits of the Roman Church came from the Hellenization of Christian religion, and this was partly due to the success of the Judaizers in leading Christians astray.

But evangelical religion is now morphing yet again under the influence of the “Seeker Sensitive” crap. In the 1970s-1980s there had been a very good movement to empower church members to be more active, but twenty years later it was squelched by a handful of “thinkers” who reversed it under the guise of books like The Purpose Driven Life, which was just a cover for dumbing-down the pew-sitters. It was the globalist agenda infiltrated into religion. This stuff has become second nature to Millennials and X-Gen believers, blended with the entrepreneurial church polity. The latest wave of Christian religion is just another kind of entertainment franchise with corporate leadership.

Since the last Apostle died, every step along this convoluted path has been just one brand or another of worshiping the religious institution instead of the Lord. Throughout Church History, both West and East, it’s one kind of institution partially displacing its predecessor and winning a new audience that reflects the times. Most of them are still hanging around as institutions dominated by people who can’t distinguish the institution from the living Son of God. The leaders of each institution keep insisting that serving the Lord means serving the institution (and obeying their leadership).

Does anybody notice how this looks and sounds exactly like the Deep State controlling the secular institution of government? How are these religious institutional leaders any morally better than clearly evil government? I’m not saying figures like the Pope are all knowingly serving Satan. They might be, but that they are so completely lost from the rather simple gospel message of Jesus and His friends that they don’t really understand the harm they do. The institution is their god.

This is the same thing Jesus confronted in the Jewish leadership, the Pharisees in particular. They had completely left the Hebrew mystical frame of mind. Instead, they had embraced the Hellenistic assumptions about reality. Suddenly, the words of the Law of Moses were more important than the very well established intent of Moses. The latter got lost; Jesus said that many times. Their “Law” became their rationalistic analysis of the words of the written Torah, and they created a whole new “oral Torah” that was flatly contrary to what God wanted. They worshiped their “oral Torah” as a mask for worshiping their own cleverness and intelligence.

It’s the same basic sin for both Pharisees (Judaism is simply Pharisaism) and the historic church leadership since Jesus’ day.

Yet, knowing this, I would also warn that it is impossible to recover some golden age of New Testament Christian religion. This is a case of learning what it isn’t, and discovering what it is for you, but there is no standard “what it should be” that fits every need. Some portion of what they had in the early years in Jerusalem cannot be ours. It’s important that you sense that.

Instead, we must understand that it’s not necessary to throw out everything we’ve learned in our varied church experiences. While I might avoid some songs for blatantly bad doctrine, I still sing from my old Baptist Hymnal, among other things. I still sing the worship songs that moved me back in the day. I still use some of the academic terminology I learned from that Baptist college.

But a very major difference is that I no longer accept the notion that the gospel message is about getting a passport to Heaven. There is nothing at all we can do about that as humans, nor can we even understand. Rather, the gospel message is about seeking peace with God according to His Covenant while we are here. American evangelical churches are filled with people who only think they are “saved” and going to Heaven, because they have been talked into something that has no bearing on the matter.

The whole point of being here in this world is not that we secure our election, but that we demonstrate an election that tagged us before we were born. Do you recall that God said He meant for Israel to be a nation of priests between Him and the world? That’s our mission now. Instead of a national political covenant, we now have a moral covenant of individuals. We still have a covenant manifested partly in words that look and sound like law, but the soul of the Covenant of Christ is still our feudal surrender and commitment to serve Him and His glory.

There is no bright clear line separating the New Covenant from the Old. Some parts are clearly different. But there are bits and pieces of each that are exactly the same, because it is a covenant and our God has always been feudal. He does have an expressed will written for the sake of those who need a boost to get started into manifesting the spiritual truth of divine election.

We are elected (predestined) unto lives of good work for the Kingdom. The gospel is about the boundaries and privileges of our election while we live here as His testimony. I want you to leave behind the man-made bondage of false religion and find peace with God. Nobody has to ape my way peace with God. I am perfectly content to let you all discover what that demands of you individually.

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Leaving the Herd 03

Posted on January 17, 2023 by ehurst

Part 1 of this series provided a foundation and overview. Part 2 outlines the essential elements of mysticism in faith.

You already know that the mainstream western churches uniformly reject Biblical Law. They are not feudal, tribal or heart-led. There’s nothing that says you can’t belong to a conventional church organization, as long as you realize that it’s a social club, and not really a church. The people there are church members; very few of them are faith family as defined by the Covenant.

There’s no need to get into fights with church leaders at any level. Just don’t take them seriously when they claim that what they are doing is a reflection of what God actually requires of His children. There’s no need to sniff disdainfully and talk down to anyone. Just remind folks you are there for the fellowship and activities.

Give thought to whether you might be able to answer any questions they have about your reluctance to take their claims seriously. You can show them a copy of the Code of Noah HOWTO or anything else you believe is appropriate, but you should expect them to reject it. You should expect them to characterize falsely what those documents say. They may pressure you about it. Still, there are some that will remain open to your presence, as long as you aren’t disruptive.

In most cases, you will eventually feel compelled to leave that situation. As things continue going downhill in our world, and in America particularly, the friction will increase. We are still in a phase of apocalypse where the existing institutions will squeeze more tightly and people will huddle together. Because they are standing on false grounds, the herd identity will eventually start to fracture. When it does, you will begin to see more people asking for something stronger to believe in.

If you see the Radix Fidem way as the truth for you, then be prepared to spend some time in isolation. Except for rare instances, we will become more alienated from church folks.

Why in the world would you then try to identify with those who don’t even express allegiance to Christ at all? You have no common cause at all with secular human ambitions. If this world is doomed to Hell, how could you possibly want any part of what worldly people are doing?

When God moves and begins pouring out His wrath on sin, a part of the process is polarizing the people involved. The distance between His children and everyone else is more readily apparent. The pretense falls away, and religious fakery crumbles into dust, blown around by any strong wind. As the song says, He’s shaking His body to see who will stand and who will fall. If you walk away from the herds early, you will be less hurt by the chaos this causes.

In Acts 7, Stephen summarized some 2000 years of his nation’s history of arguing, carping and rejecting God’s Word. It’s time for another Stephen to denounce the churches as having no better record over yet another 2000 years. I wish I was him; I’d be glad to face stoning if I could get a shot at preaching to an equivalent audience like that.

That’s not my mission. Besides, we don’t have a clearly defined group of church leaders huddling together like the Sanhedrin. Instead, we have a thousand different groups rejecting God’s Word while insisting they each define what it says. Oddly, the one thing they all share is the insistence on keeping an institutional presence, as if that somehow was what God had in mind when His Son issued the Great Commission.

All I can do is share what God has shown me about His Word and hope that it triggers some kind of reaction in a few hearts that read these words. Don’t follow me; my path may not work for you. Instead, go through the process of questioning everything others lay upon you as imaginary obligations.

Human civilization is itself a lie, and so is every other form of human devised herding. Leave the herd and follow your own path.

We can see the tribulation coming, even if we could scarcely pin down any kind of details. We don’t need to. What we need is to follow our convictions and obey Biblical Law. God has never failed to guide His children where He wants them when they listen.

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Leaving the Herd 02

Posted on January 16, 2023 by ehurst

Part 1 of this series provided a foundation and overview. We must make ourselves conscious that the only thing egalitarian about our human existence is that we all start out doomed to Hell. We are fallen, and our human existence itself is a big lie, and our human capabilities are deceived and deceiving. This is not what God had in mind for us when He placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Eden is not a place, per se; Eden is a condition of life. We are supposed to be in our eternal form without a mortal fleshly nature. In Eden, we were not dragging around a mortal body full of lies and defilement. To return to Eden is a path of living that increasingly denounces the flesh and embraces our eternal nature, trapped inside of this defiled mortal frame.

It is utterly impossible to explain the situation in human language; the intellect cannot grasp the truth of things. That’s why the Eden narrative is obviously not literal, but symbolic. It’s a parable, mixing in some literal elements with a broadly metaphorical image. It’s not about the story itself, but what the story should tell you about our situation as fallen creatures. It’s not human history, but moral truth.

Note: There is nothing morally superior about literal expression. Divine truth is not propositional. If it’s a proposition the mind can handle, then it falls short of truth. Thus, it is no insult, no weakening of revelation, to say that the Eden narrative is mostly symbolic. Divine truth is the living connection between us and God; it is inherently personal.

Something in us pulls away from God’s divine revelation and the utter necessity that we depend on Him for every little thing. The issue is not the things, but the ongoing dynamic connection that is depicted throughout the Bible. Truth is not objective; it is intensely personal in nature. Truth cannot exist separate from God. He cannot simply spin it off to stand out there on its own, waiting for us to find it somehow. Truth exists only as a trait of the Creator Himself. The only way to know the truth about anything is to know God personally, and to keep that connection alive.

Thus, the only valid purpose of human existence in our mortal frame is to fight through that mortal frame back to clinging closely to the Father. We are not in His class; we cannot trust our own capabilities to discern the truth, as if God could wind us up and let us go. We must constantly defer to Him as to what is good and evil. The question exceeds the powers of human reason. Reason is fit only as a slave; it is otherwise our enemy. It’s capabilities can barely handle the task of organizing and implementing what the heart knows about good and evil.

Good and evil are not in the choices and actions themselves, but from the context of our response to the Father. It’s whatever God says to us in our hearts within that moment. How does the New Testament say that we already know God’s truth? It’s written in our convictions. Not as words or concrete ideas, but it’s written on our hearts as conviction, as moral imperatives. It cannot be formulated as established principles because it’s alive and moves with the living Spirit of God. It will not be the same in every context. Only the heart is capable of recognizing the common threads that hold it all together. Our faculty for reason is not able.

Not all of us are called to be or do the same thing in every context. God most certainly does not “play fair” with us. He has decided what role each of us should play in His plans. He favors all His children, but that favor is not the same for each. The favor is not measured by reason; the favor is measured by the assurance that we are at peace with Him personally and individually.

Your divine inheritance is yours alone. Your flesh may envy what God gives someone else, but your heart knows that you cannot make good use of the things God gives to your brothers and sisters. We are each individually appointed to different blessings. Our gifts vary naturally. A church body should not be all one thing; not everyone has the same gifts of the Spirit. What a monstrosity it would be if God treated us all exactly the same! Why would we need each other if everyone was alike? We need each other because the Lord designed us to work in community.

But the nature of that community is rooted in Heaven, discernible only with the heart, not with human reckoning. Divine truth may or may not make sense; His requirements are quite unreasonable. The reason must be compelled to obey without a cause it can recognize.

You should not be able to herd Christians. We should love each other and cooperate when we can, but we must remain hesitant about some things. Your primary duty is to follow your convictions while keeping a close eye on the boundaries of Biblical Law (aka, The Covenant of Christ). If the fundamental law of Christ includes loving feudal submission to the Father, then that naturally means we will want to please Him. We are not exempt from studying the various written commands to get a feel for our Father’s divine moral character. But in the end, we must learn to recognize that He will lead us all in different ways.

We simply cling more to those whose leading from the Lord doesn’t interfere with our convictions. We should always be ready to walk alone to remain faithful to our calling and mission. Yet, we should always be ready to fellowship with odd people who claim His name. The whole job of church is not “getting things done” but of learning the boundaries of fellowship and shared faith.

The most challenging part of that for us today is that the Covenant of Christ is feudal, calls for a tribal social structure, and is very strongly anti-western. Any church formed on that basis is held together by conviction, not rules. While the leadership must be feudal, they will understand that you are only loosely attached, ready to move on at any moment when the Spirit calls. This is quite contrary to the western style of reverence for the institution itself. It’s not a question of whether your church leadership could be wrong, but that it’s guaranteed not everything they choose will be appropriate for you. It’s on you to decide when and how you must dissent. The whole mission of the church is the ongoing negotiation between members on whether and how they should stay together or part company.

A church is a family, not an institution. It’s a spiritual and moral kinship. The shared covenant is the whole identity. The covenant assumes there is no loss of love simply because it’s time to go somewhere else, or that there is insufficient grounds for continuing as a single community in the first place.

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Leaving the Herd 01

Posted on January 15, 2023 by ehurst

Conversations and online reading convince me that, even among those who should know better, an awful lot of people still believe that some kind of bailout is possible. They talk and write as if they expect the Lord to provide a large scale solution to the ills of this world.

One of the biggest flaws is the fundamental assumption that God sponsors human rights and equality. Those values are flatly contrary to what the Bible says. This in turn rests on the blatantly false notion that humans aren’t actually fallen and, by default, doomed to Hell. Most people operate on the assumption that they are in a neutral condition, and have a choice.

By default, every human born is going to Hell. The only escape is by God’s choice. The Bible uses the language of “election” — God alone elects. You cannot choose Him until He first chooses you, and that choice is not automatic for every human born. Paul wrote at length about this in Romans 8 & 9, and people still flatly reject it, looking for any excuse possible to insist that the leverage rests in human hands. That false doctrine is part of our fallen nature.

Do you understand that God expects you to read between the lines of Scripture? It’s not just the words, but the broad image of what is portrayed by the words. That’s what Paul meant when he told Timothy to “rightly divide the Word”. Some truths are not openly stated because human language cannot carry the load. Only the heart can process moral truth; the brain is not up to the task. So, the only way you can figure it out is to have your heart receive it and tell your brain what to do about it.

Your heart is part of your eternal nature; your brain belongs to your mortal flesh. The intellect is part of your fallen nature, along with your five senses. None of that will enter into Eternity with your soul. And your conscious awareness is just a manifestation of the two interacting. Your conscious awareness works far better if it is rooted in your heart, not your intellect — thus, the term “heart-led”. If you are going to understand the metaphorical (symbolic or parabolic) language of the Bible, it must be processed in the heart, not the head.

Jesus always taught in parables. The ultimate truth of things cannot be expressed in words. Parables can be used to trigger perception in the conscious awareness of things the heart already knows, but the mind has refused to hear for whatever reason. If your conscious awareness has been awakened to the moral realm of the heart, then it will make sense of parables. As long as your awareness resides in your head, the whole thing is opaque.

Your mortal fleshly existence has only one valid purpose: It’s a tool for moving closer to the glory of God. In the process, you must learn to deny the fleshly nature whatever it desires. You must nail it to the Cross (Galatians 2:20). It’s a constant process that does not end until your mortal being dies. Your conscious awareness should be consumed with a desire to leave the flesh behind and enter the Eternal realm. Crossing that boundary is a reward; the duty of your life in this world is to push farther and farther away from the fleshly nature.

That includes walking away from the mass of humanity who have no eternal awakening in their souls. There is nothing good in humanity. It’s not a question of what they actually possess internally; they are doomed to Hell by birthright. There’s nothing you can do about that, nor can you even perceive their eternal state. Rather, it’s a matter of their orientation. All you have is the manifestations. The mass of humanity is on the highway to Hell. You must reject their orientation and all the trappings of it.

Well, a primary element in their damnation orientation is something equivalent to herd instinct. You are permitted, even encouraged, to embrace a shallow differentiation that doesn’t actually challenge the herd identity. But all the minor variations don’t mean anything; the fall within a very narrow range that is safe and doesn’t threaten the reliance on fleshly perceptions. Once you start listening to the eternal heart, you realize all of them are dead.

The only thing that distinguishes us is the grace of God. He will grant to you spiritual birth; the grounds and process of this are totally opaque to us. All we can possibly understand is that something changes internally and we are awakened by the Presence of the Holy Spirit. But that by itself does not change your life. It is the essential necessary equipping for the real work of redemption in how you think and act. It empowers you; it does not initiate the process of killing the fleshly nature for you.

Rather, the Presence grants you the choice. People without the Holy Spirit cannot choose righteousness. Any incidental elements of truth and righteousness that enters their lives is random, and it does them no good at all. They don’t recognize it for what it is, because they are wholly unable to process on that level. Some precious few might have a link between head and heart, but their spirits remain dead. Being heart-led alone is not enough. But being heart-led is absolutely necessary for those who are spiritually alive.

The only use you have for anything in this life is merely as a means to some transcendent end. Yes, tools are valuable, but only as tools. They are expendable. The farther you press into an eternal orientation, the less you care about this life and what belongs to it. You have an inner voice telling you that your time is short, and the only thing you can actually claim is the glory you have given to the Creator while you were here. Nothing else comes with you into Eternity.

Yes, the world around us going to Hell, and in every way. The social and political situation is degrading rapidly. No human, nor all humans together, than halt or even slow the process. God’s wrath is rising by the day, flooding every corner of human existence. Humanity is destroying itself. Worse, any day now the sun is going to puke on us. First is any number of small incidents that will eventually kill off our modern energy system. The electrical grid will be fried. Later down the road — about 20 years or so — the sun will experience a micro-nova that will rain down destruction on the earth.

I don’t believe this is the End. Rather, it will be a major reset rather like it was with Noah. Most of the human race will be wiped out. God will spare some small portion of the human race to start again. We don’t see the prophesied earmarks of the Final End.

Recognizing all of this, a proper spiritual orientation would be to prepare ways we can help the survivors live more like God intended. We must build a proper orientation on how to leave this world as a victor, not a fool locked into fleshly lusts. Whether or not you seek to survive the next 20 years of tribulation should be a matter of hearing from your heart, not your human calculus of survival. More than that, the means and methods of your preparation must flow from your spiritual awareness.

Because the only thing that really matters is not surviving itself. Rather, what matters is your testimony of faith in the God who created all these things and set up the cycles of destruction that serve only to demonstrate that His divine revelation is the ultimate truth. You can do things His way, or you can fail miserably and never understand anything that matters.

Stop following the herd into Hell.

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NT Doctrine — Acts 7

Posted on January 14, 2023 by ehurst

Israel never seemed to understand that their national identity was not the DNA of Abraham, but their adherence to the Covenant. They were never very good at inviting others to embrace the revelation they were given for that very purpose. They got worse as time went on. Jesus had told His disciples to take the New Covenant to all nations.

Stephen was the first man to knowingly stretch the initial audience of the gospel of the Messiah. The gospel message went first to Hebrew-speaking Jews in Palestine. At Pentecost, a miracle brought the message to a few Jews who spoke other languages. With the authorizing of the seven Greek-speaking elders, the message began spreading by their reflex to preach among the Hellenized Jews. The Lord Himself was tearing down the wall Jews had built around themselves to keep the world out of the Covenant.

But Stephen had warned his audience that they had also kept themselves outside of the Covenant. They were unable to recognize that Jesus was the Messiah because they had rejected the Covenant He was trying to restore. The accusations against him were only superficially accurate. As he stood before the Sanhedrin, his face aglow, Stephen proceeded to answer the charges against him.

His primary defense was that the nation had been in no position to judge Jesus, nor anyone else, for that matter. The boundaries of their identity as the Chosen were not in the borders, nor the people, nor the Temple, nor the rules they had piled up. It was rooted in God Himself, the One who made the promises on Mount Sinai.

God had made them a nation. He started with Abraham in a far away land. His location, neither at Ur or Haran, prevented him hearing God and obeying, and reaping the promises. He surrendered his inheritance in Haran and went to wander in a land where he never owned more than a burial plot. That’s because the real inheritance he passed onto to his descendants was faith in God and His plans.

Those plans included a period of bondage in Egypt. This was to provide their national birth by His miraculous deliverance. But the descendants of Abraham were not good men, selling one of their own brothers into bondage, never realizing it was the first step in their own bondage. Their failures did not prevent God keeping His promises. Joseph prospered in Pharaoh’s court. Eventually a new dynasty arose with no sense of gratitude for just how much Joseph had done to save Egypt.

In the midst of an awful oppression, including the forced slaughter of male babies to the Nile gods, Moses not only survived, but was raised in the very courts of the Pharaoh who had tried to have him killed. God was watching over His promises. Still, his own nation rejected Moses when he sought to lead them out. They would rather stay and suffer than do the work of becoming a nomadic people as God intended.

So it took another forty years while Moses doubled his education. Having first learned everything the Egyptians could teach him, Jethro taught him his forgotten Aramaic heritage and the knowledge of Jehovah. After this, he returned to Egypt to lead God’s people out. It was a real struggle and they still weren’t ready to leave, but were eventually driven out because of the miraculous afflictions God brought on their oppressors. They whined pitifully all the way through incomparable miracle of crossing the sea on dry ground.

All the way through the wilderness of Sinai, they kept up the idolatry they had picked up from other nations, nations that had none of Jehovah’s promises. But God was faithful, and His wrath fell only lightly upon them for their sins. He gave them the Tabernacle to build up their sense of identity, all the while keeping the pillar of fire and smoke with them. He gave them the deliverer they rejected, the Law they disobeyed, the Tabernacle they neglected in favor of pagan deities. Still, He drove out the pagan nations under Joshua so they could possess the Promised Land.

Later, while living in that land, He granted them powerful leaders who built the Temple, along with the nation’s wealth and power. What did they lack from God’s hand to make them a proud nation who might serve His glory? They cared more about the symbols than the God who loved them.

After reciting all of this, Stephen lowered the boom. Which of His prophets had Israel not persecuted or killed? They prophesied of the coming Messiah who, when He came in due time, they promptly rejected and murdered. The Word was delivered by the hands of angels, even in the form of a man, but they refused to obey. When did this nation not reject the God who called and made them from nothing?

When Stephen then claimed to see the vision of Jesus standing in the clouds — the vision they had already rejected when Jesus promised to return — they could bear it no longer. They bum rushed Stephen and dragged him outside the city walls. Instead of a proper Hebrew execution of solemnly crushed by stones, they were throwing them wildly at him with visceral hatred.

Luke notes that a certain Saul was there as their official witness, probably the lowest ranking member of their staff, denied the satisfaction of participating in this bloodlust. Stephen’s final words was a plea for God’s mercy on those who were killing him.

The only mercy God granted was in waiting another generation before pouring His wrath on the remnant of the formerly Chosen People in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. They had closed the door on God’s Word for the last time. There was no going back after the hasty execution of Stephen. The Lord was going to send His message to the nations.

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Slimjet Censors Websites

Posted on January 11, 2023 by ehurst

In the past I had recommended the Slimjet browser as a good alternative to Google Chrome. It has some nifty features. However, an unexpected “feature” recently appeared: It censors some websites. I was testing how Slimjet worked under certain conditions this week it reliably blocked a collection of websites that other browsers did not.

Any website that represents the Russian point of view versus Ukraine will be blocked. For example, I visited RT.com. The site’s front page loaded, but none of the articles would. I used other browsers and the site operated just fine during the same time frame, but Slimjet acted like the site was not responding. My Net meter indicated it was not sending the page request in the first place.

I can no longer recommend Slimjet because of their obvious political bias in selectively blocking the user from visiting some websites.

If you really like Chrome’s rending engine, I recommend you switch from Slimjet to Vivaldi. If you aren’t that much in love with Blink, I can highly recommend Palemoon. Both of them are different enough that it may take some time and a little effort to get used to the differences in how they operate, and the various setup options in particular.

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Reality Inherently Flawed

Posted on January 9, 2023 by ehurst

A lot of people struggle with this: Reality is variable between observers. It is utterly impossible to arrive at a single inclusive answer. It’s not a question of what is, but of how we must approach the question, and what we should expect to find. How do I talk about such a thing?

If you approach scientific research into physical reality with the assumption that, in theory, everything can be eventually nailed down precisely as to how it acts, then you will never arrive. This is particularly true when you start to press down into subatomic levels, as well as the other extreme, to galactic levels or larger. The effort to measure will break down.

In practice, reality itself is inconsistent at some level. It is not possible to correct either the observer, the instruments, or the process itself, so as to overcome this invisible barrier to investigation. The barrier itself is elusive; it cannot be identified except in terms of effects after the fact. A lot of stuff in science fiction will ever remain fiction, because it’s not possible to nail things down to the point that you can begin to manipulate matter and energy with sufficient precision to get the results you want.

The major flaw is in the underlying assumptions about reality. I’ve written about that often enough. Reality is intentionally flawed, and so are we as a part of it. It is not possible to step outside into some imaginary objectivity as long as we are in our mortal frame. To step outside means leaving this mortal frame permanently. As long as we refuse to consider that there is a realm outside this reality, we cannot begin to grasp the nature of things. We are inside of a bubble, and the time-space boundaries are themselves a universal deception. But in our native form as mortals, we cannot ever hope to escape.

This is part of why algorithms inevitably break down. No algorithm can cover all the factors in the first place. But the variability-in-effect of reality will eventually break down even what the algorithm does cover. All algorithms are generated from flawed humans, and the product cannot avoid having the same flaws. The flaws are in the source, the process and the product.

Thus, no AI will ever exceed the flaws. The mythology that foresees an omniscient AI will never become reality. We may have the appearance of such an AI, but at some level of output, it will stumble over the inconsistency of reality. Calling it “entropy” is not going to answer the fundamental question. That fancy word simply acknowledges the effects, not the cause. The flaw is in this reality itself.

Any attempt at AI will always pull up short of human dreams, whether benign or malevolent. It’s not a question of matching the capabilities of human will and imagination; AI cannot escape the limitations of reality’s inherent flaws. I have no doubt that we will eventually see one or more attempts to seat an AI as human government of some kind, and it will probably seem successful. But it will eventually fail; the problem of guiding humans will always break down.

This is how our Creator does things. It won’t matter whether you see it as God’s active intervention or a matter of inherent design; both approaches will miss the point. The point is that you cannot in mortal form ever grasp the answer. The more you wonder about it, the harder you seek to understand, the more you will run into the effects of something none of us can overcome.

Nor would I say we have nothing to worry about, in terms of human suffering. Mankind will always overrun the limits and make this life worse than it has to be. Still, this existence is supposed to suck; it’s a deception in the first place. God didn’t make it that way. We chose it and we keep choosing it. It’s when you make the final decision to turn away from this life and turn to Eternity that you understand how to live while we are here.

If you can absorb this to the point it’s fundamental to how you approach everything, it opens the door to divine peace. It is human nature to pursue everything but that one thing.

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NT Doctrine — Acts 6:9-15

Posted on January 7, 2023 by ehurst

Once again, I am unable to improve on my previous commentary on this passage.

All of these new elders preached, but unlike the Apostles, they had the natural tendency to preach outside the old Hebrew communities. It’s hard to explain Stephen’s behavior unless we assume he had some rabbinical training. He knew not merely the text of the Old Testament, but also much of the oral historical traditions now missing or buried in Talmudic mythology. Highly educated, yet filled with the Spirit such that he manifested signs and miracles, this man took the message to places the Apostles could not. Preaching was not confined to those called to pastor.

Perhaps Stephen had previously been associated with the Synagogue of the Freedmen. The synagogue name refers to Greek-speaking Jews who had formerly been slaves under Roman law, but somehow won their freedom. It was quite an accomplishment. There may have been hundreds of such little cloistered synagogues in and around Jerusalem, catering to one group or another. This synagogue must have held some claim to fame, with big shots from Alexandria, North Africa, and what we now call Turkey and Northern Syria. It would naturally be a Greek-speaking synagogue, and Stephen was quite comfortable, not only in the language, but the Alexandrian style of rhetoric so popular with such people. It is important here to note that no one seemed to have any particular vision for spreading the gospel outside native Judeans; Stephen simply went to those with whom he had some affinity.

In debating with these Freedmen, Stephen was promoting the gospel of Jesus Christ. In this gospel he would surely have included Jesus’ rejection of the Hellenized Talmud, so near and dear to Alexandrian hearts. Stephen approached them on their own terms, with their own style of reasoning. He showed how Jesus was the central focal point of all ancient prophecies, had fulfilled the Law of Moses, and closed the Temple rituals. There was now no other sacrifice acceptable to God but the blood of His Son for forgiveness of sins. So Stephen was arguing that the Talmud was wrong, the rituals were dead, and Jesus was the rightful King of all Jews worldwide.

We are hardly surprised that those who were not moved by the Spirit to accept this impossible message would be infuriated at this smart-aleck attacking everything they thought made them special in God’s eyes. What far too many wish to underplay here is the hateful racist superiority complex of Jews in that day. They might argue among themselves who was more pure in Jewishness, but nobody would ever surrender an inch to including actual Gentiles in God’s blessings. Jehovah made the world, but He was in their minds God of the Jews only, and everyone else was made by God to serve them. Any Messianic message failing to confirm this prejudice was hateful to them.

So they networked with other significant figures in the city to accuse Stephen before the Sanhedrin. All this sounded to them like blasphemy, and an attack on the Temple itself, “God’s Residence.” Luke calls them false witnesses in the sense that they lied against God and His Word, but the claims were more or less accurate from the slavishly literalist viewpoint of the Pharisees.

What had Jesus actually said? When the Twelve were discussing the Temple facility one day, Jesus said it was just a building, and would one day suffer the fate of all buildings. Moreover, it would be utterly destroyed because His Nation would reject Him. While it may well be in the minds of Jews the Residence of Jehovah, His divine Presence had not been there in centuries. Instead, it was born in the flesh of His Son. So Jesus pointed to His own body and said if anyone tried to tear down this Temple, He would simply bring it back in three days. More, He was going away to make His followers into walking Temples of the Lord, just as He had been. He would reside in their hearts as the Holy Spirit. There was simply no room for such truth in the minds of the Jewish leaders.

So arresting Stephen and hauling him before the assembled court, they saw a man whose face glowed with divine presence. It must surely have made them nervous, for to be in God’s presence always makes us aware of our sin. We can either confess it and be forgiven, or close our hearts and cling to sin as our “holiness.” The tension between the truth and the established order was about to erupt.

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