NT Doctrine — Acts 1

Posted on November 26, 2022 by ehurst

(For this chapter, I can find no reason to rewrite the commentary I’ve already published elsewhere.)

Luke mentions that Jesus in His resurrected form remained for some 40 days on earth. During that time, He met with His disciples extensively in Galilee, after which they returned to Jerusalem. What Luke and John seem to emphasize was the critical importance of their understanding of how the Old Testament prophesied of His death, burial for three days, and His resurrection. They were taught quite a bit during this time based on their changed understanding of these things. Still, they did not have the Spirit. Jesus assured them He would come very soon, describing it as a baptism in fire.

But because they lacked that illuminating Presence, they still stumbled over their impression that the Kingdom was meant to be a human political order on earth. Was Jesus about to set Israel free from Roman domination? They had no doubt He could. Jesus had already told them repeatedly that this was not in the plans, but their minds were not ready for it. Instead, He pointed them back to the fundamental principle of believers living under various human governments. God retains full authority over such things, had long since ordained how it would all turn out and when, and seldom deemed it necessary to inform humans of his plans. Instead, they were to focus their minds on the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the mission which paid little heed to governments among men – to carry the gospel across all national borders to all men.

It almost seems as if we can see them hiking out of the northeastern gate of the city, across the Kidron, up the long sloping road to the pass between two peaks on Mount Olivet. As they crossed the zenith, they started down the slope toward Bethany, Jesus walking firmly in the lead. Except He didn’t head down the road to Bethany, but simply stepped off into the air and floated away into the clouds, turning to raise His hands and bless them. As they stood there watching for one last glimpse of their Master, a voice told them that the time for such things was past. Turning to look at who spoke, they see angels. The angels promised that Jesus would someday return in pretty much the same fashion.

It was a Sabbath Day’s Journey back into the city. By that time, the Pharisees had fiddled with the meaning of the phrase until it stretched as much as 2.25 miles (3.6km). We find the disciples had moved their latest base of operations away from Bethany to the home in the Bethesda Quarter that hosted their banquet before Passover.

Luke names the eleven surviving disciples, as well as the women associated with Jesus’ ministry, but he includes the Lord’s own younger brothers. Indeed, the group had grown to some 120 members. About the only thing they could take action on at this point was replacing Judas Iscariot. Luke explains that Judas’ betrayal bribe was used to purchase the field, apparently where Judas had decided to hang himself. That was the evening before Passover Day, when no one was going to retrieve a dead body, particularly one having died so shamefully as hanging. Since he wasn’t dealt with until sometime later, his swollen body was pretty hard to handle, and may have already fallen to the ground. The easiest answer for the Sanhedrin, seeking to keep all of this secret, was buying the field where he lay and designating it as a pauper’s grave site. The money they used was Judas’ reward for betrayal, which could not be returned to the Temple treasury because it was blood money. Since the secrecy was so poor, the acreage was eventually called “Field of Blood” in honor of Judas’ death there, and the dirty money used to buy it.

It turned out there had been a handful of other men who had strung along with the Twelve pretty much the whole time they followed Jesus. While He officially called out the original group, nothing kept others from participating as volunteers. Perhaps they were younger men not yet working, or wealthy enough to afford the time. It’s typical of ancient, and particularly Eastern cultures, to pay little attention to this minor detail, since it was too common. Central figures in a narrative get named, but it was almost silly to name servants unless they took part in the action, and equally silly to assume there were none present. Jesus had a steady entourage much bigger than the Twelve, except in those places when the Gospels specifically say otherwise. At any rate, these men had experienced pretty much the same as the Twelve, so they chose one of them for the office Judas held. The method they used was a holdover from the Temple rituals. It was still appropriate because the Holy Spirit was not yet present to change the mode of operations.

There is nothing to indicate that Peter was wrong to seek fulfillment of the passages in Psalms (69:25; 109:8). Both of those were long regarded as prefiguring the trials of the Messiah, so finding in those verses a call to fill Judas’ empty place is typical of Hebrew thinking. On the other hand, we have almost nothing about this man. Luke never mentions him again, but that’s not exactly surprising, since this is mostly about Peter and Paul, and events that connect them. Further, the scraps of information we can find among the Early Church writers are contradictory. Perhaps a historian might guess he eventually went on mission to Ethiopia, but little else can be said. What matters is these people continued applying the Law of Moses as best they understood in the absence of the Holy Spirit to clarify things. It may have been a pointless gesture in the grand scheme of things, but the action was not wrong in the context. They simply did the best they knew until the one defining miracle of God changed it all.

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First Step in the Right Direction

Posted on November 24, 2022 by ehurst

Scripture is not revelation; it is a manifestation of revelation. Revelation is God telling you about Himself, in terms of what you can know about Him while in your fallen state. The whole point is to get to know Him via seeing how He operates. You must absorb what is normal for God. You don’t get that by intellect; intellectual grasp is the wrong tool for knowing God. You know God in your heart. It’s personal, or it’s nothing.

Part of that revelation is backing off far enough from specific events to see the moral pattern of Creation. God made all things based on His moral character, so reality is naturally going to reflect that. As I noted in my previous post, it requires that you adopt a view that embraces the full scope of human existence, not just the sort of stuff you can grasp from the shorter time span of your own life. You have to see things across the ages. Every pursuit of man is best understood from that perspective.

If you stuck with just the shorter time span, and tried to isolate moral questions into compartments, you would never grasp the incalculable wisdom of hearing from God. Until you actually study economics as part of this kind of bigger picture, instead of trying to narrow it down to economics alone, you cannot hope to understand human behavior at large. More to the point, you will never understand the dynamics of what causes unnecessary suffering in our world, because you will have no clue what sort of suffering is necessary.

Scripture condemns the very notion of real estate ownership. The whole question of who gets to claim what turf in the Bible is a matter of trusting the Lord. You trust Him to grant some portion of His creation for your use in serving Him. You further trust Him to enable control of that grant via occupation. The term “occupation” is the closest we can come in English to the image of using and defending geographical boundaries.

It opens up a question of shared use, for example. It places the question in a proper context, so that it is less likely that participants will not spoil it for each other. Context is everything in biblical thinking. When you look at the Western system with its materialism, you should not be surprised that attempts to establish a common (shared) use facility never works very well. It requires building on a moral foundation that attacks materialism.

With a proper moral foundation, and the naturally attendant philosophical assumptions, you’ll know something is wrong instinctively before you can articulate what’s wrong with it. That’s how heart-led wisdom works. But it’s also quite refreshing when someone comes along to criticize eloquently what you already knew from your heart was evil.

In economics chatter these days, the role of Michael Hudson is to ask better questions and shoot holes in the lying system of economics under which we live in the West. In the linked interview, he notes that the bulk of what the elite use to enslave folks in the West is real estate lending. It requires pulling everything in under a centralized government that will enforce debt obligations. Thus, owning the debt becomes the key to owning the people, without having any accountability to anyone.

Unproductive debt is when the debt doesn’t enable you to earn more money to pay the creditor. In an unproductive debt, you have to earn the money elsewhere and take money that you may earn as wages or profits and pay the bank. And it’s your loss. It’s a zero sum game, not a positive sum game.

Now this distinction between productive and unproductive debt was built into Sumerian and Babylonian laws. Only unproductive debts were canceled under the Jubilee year the rulers announced. Their word was, andurarum and, the Hebrew, cognate was deror and that was the word used for the Jubilee year….

And if you didn’t cancel the debt, then the poor cultivator would be forced into a debt bondage to the creditor. And if he did that, then his labor would belong to the creditor and he couldn’t serve in the army. He couldn’t go to work on building public infrastructure. The business debts were all left in place. Debt denominated in silver were left in place and not canceled. The debts denominated in grain were canceled.

This is the primary difference between covenant and contract. In a covenant — ANE feudalism — you own the people, not as mere property, but as treasure. They are your covenant family. Further, that treasure is a feudal grant from God. In western feudalism (“contract”), the moral obligation is dissolved and the only thing left is the cold, hard hand of force. The duty of the contract parties is highly restricted to mere material. Thus, western feudalism is all about owning land, and the people are simply an artifact of the land. There is no family relationship with the people.

Satan has lied to the globalist elite. They honestly believe that their system can work. It cannot. In every generation, and in every locale, God continually raises up people with a sense of moral character that rejects the western globalist system, even if they cannot verbalize what’s wrong with it. They will not bow the knee to false principles of land ownership and a proxy of force.

Sure, it’s easy to get bogged down in how Michael Hudson doesn’t talk enough about how the western globalist system is a Jewish conspiracy; he typically refers simply to “billionaires” or “the 1%”. But if you are going to criticize the way the Jewish ethnic agenda has been secretly inserted into everything, you really must ensure you understand how it works. It’s not enough to blame Jewish elite for this situation; you have to understand why and how they are wrong. Otherwise, you are no better than the Jews you condemn.

Those who call out the Jewish conspiracy are typically ignorant of the difference between Jewish and Hebrew. The Jews are not Hebrew, neither in DNA nor in ideology. What Jews do today has only the most superficial connection with Old Testament religion. Jesus was a Jew only in the sense of political and legal jurisdiction. He was not at all Jewish in His orientation. As long as you cannot tell the difference between what Jesus taught and what Judaism (Talmudic ideology) does, then you will be just as much a slave of Satan as the Jews.

I’m not saying Michael Hudson is a prophet of God. Rather, he is a good antidote to the lies of the Jewish elite globalists. It’s a good first step in the right direction. Also, keep in mind that there is no significant moral distinction between left and right; they are both on the same false scale of materialism. Neither has a moral advantage.

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The Scale of Things

Posted on November 22, 2022 by ehurst

Solomon said that all is futility and chasing after the wind. He was referring to typical human concerns, as opposed to the deeper moral issues of Eternity. The rest of the Bible makes it clear that the only way to escape futility is to stop seeing the world through the lens of your own experience, your own short lifespan.

The prophet Malachi in particular addressed this. In his prophecy he portrays the Covenant duty of seeing oneself as just a single paving stone in the road on the vast stretch of God’s involvement in human affairs. He does this by rebuking the priests who had already begun to secularize, not seeing the critical part they played in the bigger picture. You have no choice in the path that road takes; your only option is to help make the road strong and stable, or to fall out of place and weaken things. You may not feel like you are doing that much, but it matters enough that God uses key individuals to change whole eras in history. You cannot know what part you will play until, in Eternity, the Lord shows you how important your faithfulness was to Him.

Or, you can simply choose to embrace the message that asserts your obedience matters, whether you can see it or not. Even without prophecies and revelations to us, He speaks most loudly to every human alive via their convictions, what we also call the leading of the heart, the moral language of the soul. If you would just pay attention to that, you would see all too clearly that your obedience matters in His ongoing revelation.

It is from the prophecy of Malachi that I got the image of moral infrastructure, building for the future. The biggest part of what God does on this earth comes in a time lag that is longer than human lifespan. He allows us to see that if we choose to look. If you really need some kind of moral affirmation, it’s found in your heart. It’s where you begin to see all things in terms of a timeless perspective, which in turn enables you to see across the ages of human activity in one broad sweep. That’s the place where Malachi still stands, warning us today: Build the moral infrastructure for future generations.

God works on a wholly different time scale. You are living with the results of choices made by previous generations. He established cycles that are thousands of years long, and all of that is included in His revelation. While you may lack the talent for thinking like that, what you do not lack is the ability to know His will for you. If you decide to play your part, He promises that it will work out in blessings you cannot see in this life. That’s simply the way it is. That’s why it is so important to embrace faith. And you should know that “faith” is a fancy word that means your lifelong commitment and submission to the will of God.

If you truly desire His will, He will show it to you — without fail.

Would you like to see some evidence of those vast cycles in thousands of years? Try this: Suspicious Observers. We are now living at the end of a 12,000 year cycle of galactic activity that will result in solar catastrophes. While the exact timing is impossible to measure with our current technology, it appears that the peak of disasters will come in about 25 years. That includes our sun experiencing a micro-nova, blasting the entire solar system with super-heated dust, high energy emissions, and a host of other effects that will likely wipe out most of the human population on this planet.

I believe the general thrust of that story; my convictions witness to the broad conclusions. To the degree this scientific estimation is accurate, it portrays for us the vast sweep of God’s hand. Whether mankind turns to Him or not, these events will come. For those who ignore the voice of God speaking in their hearts, their survival will be fairly random. For those who seek peace with God, their survival will fit into a pattern of divine purpose. If all you are worried about is whether you will make it, and how comfortable you’ll be, you will completely miss the point. If you tend to see yourself as a small part of what God is doing across the ages, you won’t care too much about your personal fortunes.

What you will care about is how to maintain that peace with God. You’ll be thinking about practical ways you can keep your testimony of His glory intact, regardless of the circumstances. All you really need to know about what’s coming is what it demands of you to remain faithful. And the answer will be in your convictions. Learn to recognize the truth of who you are and what role you play in God’s plans; learn to hear the voice of your convictions. They will often contradict the voice of your reason and your senses.

Minor example: It is not a matter of reason that I refuse to trust Microsoft as a provider of software and networking services. My reason suggests they are safer than Google. Yet, my convictions tell me just the opposite. It’s not a question of who is the good guy or bad guy, or places along the spectrum. Rather, it is intuition that says, despite my strong dislike for Google, I’ll trust their cloud services for the time being, and I’ll avoid Microsoft. I’ll invest in the Google technosphere for whatever use I have of technology, and avoid Microsoft (and Apple, for that matter). I’m not suggesting you join me in my choice here, but that you should be listening to your own convictions on the matter, or whether it even matters at all.

It should be obvious, though, that if you embrace the story told by Suspicious Observers, then over the next few years, you know technology will take a serious beating from solar activity. We are overdue for a major solar flare/CME that will likely take down the electricity grids of the world, and could fry a lot of electrical and electronic equipment. There will be no networks, neither cellphone nor computer. Use it while you’ve got it, but make plans to proceed with life minus such things.

And not just your own activities, but think a little about how life will change if electricity becomes absent or sparse in our world, at least for a while. To wonder how we would all keep doing the same things is the wrong question. Rather, stop and think about how you’ll live in the utter chaos when everything shuts down. Again, the faith question is not survival, but keeping your testimony alive. How do you keep building the moral infrastructure for future generations when everyone else is scrambling for mere survival?

That will be merely the first catastrophe. While society is struggling to recover, we are still heading toward the collapse of civilization when Sol and Earth together become extremely hostile to life on this planet. I offer a bare outline of that here [PDF]. Do your convictions witness to the truth of such a thing? What does it demand of your faith? How should we live, knowing that all of this is coming?

I assure you, the current trend toward political and economic tribulation is actually a rather small threat by comparison. Most of what shows up in the news and alt-news is speculation on truly petty concerns. Most of you reading this will be alive to see the incomprehensible disasters from solar disruptions.

It’s all just chasing after the wind.

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This I’ll Defend

Posted on November 21, 2022 by ehurst

It doesn’t matter what people think of me. Hostile comments I’ve deleted on this blog are just part of the process. It’s the impertinent comments that get my attention. At least some of my readers have the wrong idea about what I believe and teach. Maybe I can help them; it’s worth a shot. If you are going to hate me, let’s make sure you have a clear idea why.

The whole point of the gospel message is that Christ has the power to change people. As someone who believes in predestination, I’m convinced there are some choices you cannot make. But you do have some options, and one of them is choosing to bow the knee and make Jesus Christ your Master and Lord. Creation itself is feudal, and fallen mankind does have the freedom to choose submission and allegiance to the Creator and His Law. Jesus is the Law of God. If you embrace God’s Law, you will be changed, Elect or not. It’s a matter of the heart, of convictions, and we are all born with convictions.

This is true for all humans. Divine revelation pointedly says your ethnic identity means nothing when it comes to making Christ Lord in your life. You either leave that behind or you don’t get there. Your ethnic identity — your “race” — has no bearing on the question, because that’s part of your fleshly existence.

However, once that choice is made, you are still left to live in this fallen world, dragging along the ball and chain of your fleshly nature. You still have to account for how that fleshly nature operates. The Law of God warns that there are practical issues, constraints that must be put on the flesh, to keep it from getting in the way of Eternity’s business.

These constraints often come in sets, patterns that we struggle to accept, because they are processed in the heart-mind, but applied in the flesh. So we have all these rules in God’s Law about human sexuality. We have rules about covering our flesh with clothing. We have rules about what’s appropriate for the two sexes, and more rules about what’s appropriate for children, and what isn’t appropriate. We also have exceptions to those rules based on divine priorities, which priorities will register in your convictions. It’s not simple and easy; you can’t memorize the rules and be done with it.

The rules cannot be clearly stated in words; they cannot be contained in human logic. You are obliged to get your heart in control of things and not trust your own intellect to figure it out. That’s part of God’s Law.

Part of this whole thing is that I am by no means constrained by your convictions, and you aren’t constrained by mine. Instead, we have a pattern of cooperation demonstrated in the Bible that includes feudalism and tribal social structure. If I’m the elder of a community, the limits of my authority are within that community. You have to volunteer to be within my moral domain. It’s not a question of agreeing with my convictions; all that’s really required of you is playing along as much as possible. Nobody says you have to stay within the limits of my convictions, but when you don’t, you can’t have my moral covering. All you have to do is tolerate me, hopefully with good humor, until the Lord calls you to some other situation.

Since I don’t take myself too seriously, you aren’t required to, either.

But if you can’t leave behind your fleshly identity — race, ethnic culture, traditions, etc. — then you have not come under my moral covering. You are not a part of the family. You may be an ally, but you aren’t under our community covenant. It’s unavoidable that my preferences will dominate; that’s part of the pattern of biblical law. If that makes you uncomfortable, feel free to join another community, or go start your own under your own convictions. The nature of what faith communities do requires that everyone be comfortable doing things in pretty much the same fashion.

I’m not trying to change who you are; I’m not trying to impose my thoughts on your hands. But if you can’t comfortably play along, you don’t belong. Some of the boundaries we must draw will include those that reflect who I am as elder. Don’t hinder the work God calls me to do as head of household. Make all the suggestions you like, but don’t interfere. If my ways are peculiar and only a tiny few can tolerate me, that’s the way it goes. I accept that.

It’s not hard to find good, solid studies indicating that your DNA has a lot to do with a certain range of tendencies. That’s part of our fleshly nature. We can do only so much to overcome that, while still dragging our fleshly nature around. In my experience, ethnic identity and skin color do have a high correlation to differences that are not easily resolved, never mind the cause.

I’m white with a strong Native American influence in my background. My white genes come with a lot of tendencies, but so does my native nurture. That puts me out on the fringes. If I step into your world, I know I won’t be comfortable for very long. Not many folks will be comfortable with mine. That’s okay; it’s the role I play in the Kingdom.

Part of my discomfort is just a matter of fallen fleshly nature, and cannot be changed. Part of it is moral conviction that says certain things people do are not right for me. And I’ll go so far as to declare some issues are fundamentally moral in nature, because the written Word says flatly that they are. So I reject Western Civilization as a whole, and common white culture is part of that. Some elements are harmless, even unavoidable, but plenty of elements of American white culture are downright evil.

But not for the reasons most activists assume. Stuff like CRT is very dangerous because it’s only partly truth. So is the Klan and some other crap out there.

I don’t favor race/ethnic conflict, but I find it generally unavoidable. There is no superior ethnic identity; all are fallen and filthy in one way or another. Chances are good that different ethnic backgrounds should avoid mixing too much. That’s just the nature of our fallen flesh, and until God grants you the power to overcome it, you won’t be comfortable with someone as weird as I am. My way is not superior; it’s just different. The greatest disaster to the gospel message has been the way people feel obliged to drag vastly different people into their churches, under the wholly fraudulent assumption that their church is the only answer God could possibly have, and end up with multiple communities under one roof.

The mere existence of multiple communities within a single church body is anathema. Separate “churches” should be separate churches.

The Tower of Babel is a part of God’s Law. It says that God demands we break up into a jillion tiny communities with highly varied languages and customs. Without that cultural uniformity within, you have no business being together. There is already enough conflict built into our human nature without aggravating things by mixing people with highly varied convictions. We should separate and depart in peace, going toward a fresh calling from God.

That’s what we should aim for. It won’t always be the case, but it’s our goal.

Sure, come hang out with me until you learn enough to start your own work. I’m glad to help you graduate; you’ll help me. That’s a major element in my ministry; I’ve always tried to spin off other ministries. My domain is an incubator, a hatchery. I don’t want you to copy me; I want you to feel led to hang around until you don’t. Let’s be colleagues as much as possible while you’re here. Take from me what you can use and leave behind what you cannot.

No, I will not defend the white race. White identity is a failure, and it will be destroyed when Christ returns. So will all the others. I will most certainly not defend Western Civilization; it has been more Satanic than all previous civilizations in human history. Like everything else, I’ll work with it while it stands, because I cannot avoid it. But I will not mourn its passing. As for the white race: On the one hand, it’s being eclipsed in many ways. Yet, it’s not going away. When the solar disasters hit earth within about 25 years, whites are particularly evolved to survive them. Some Asian races will also survive well. Most of the rest of the world will survive only by a miracle of God.

The issue is not whether people can organize, but how they do it. For one, it requires a propensity and culture of high education and adaptability. It requires a strong sense of social duty; a high trust factor helps. Self-reliance is a necessity, but it will demand being tribal. It requires the urge to sacrifice for others in your tribe, and there has to be a significant presence of such people or the community cannot make it. It’s not so much riding out the disasters as it is rebuilding afterward against vast difficulty that matters. You’ll need a strong sense of how your choices will affect future generations. Most of the world is not capable of doing what it takes.

I’m warning folks of the wrath of God falling on the whole world. This is my message; this is what my God has given me to share. A parallel but different message is not my problem. However, I have no choice but to treat any conflicting message as a lie from Hell.

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NT Doctrine — Matthew 28:16-20 & Luke 24:50-53

Posted on November 19, 2022 by ehurst

There is no strong consensus on the days Jesus spent on earth after His resurrection. We know that He met with His disciples twice in Jerusalem at both ends of the week of Unleavened Bread. The parallel passage at the end of Mark takes place in that second meeting. Mark’s version of the Great Commission is a little different, because Jesus repeated the message several times. John insists that the third meeting was the incident when seven of the men went fishing and met Jesus the next morning.

So it’s only reasonable to assume that the final verses of Matthew’s account takes us to at least the fourth meeting. They gathered at the appointed mountain location. Jesus appeared there, and the majority worshiped Him. He was no longer Jesus the man they all knew. While they had believed in their minds that He was the Son of God, it was now driven home to them in a way words cannot describe. Still, some of the followers struggled with it.

There wasn’t much He could do about it now. As He approached, He gave them a repeat of the same message He had broached back in Jerusalem. He reminded them that, having risen from death, He was now fully vested with His divine authority over all Creation. He would soon return to His throne. They were to carry on the mission that began with His baptism. It was this same baptism they were to use with those who embraced their message.

More to the point, He commanded them to teach everything He had taught. That would include the meaning of the Old Covenant, so that people could connect the miracles of the past with the miracles to come in the New Covenant. The New Covenant was even more of a privilege, and more demanding on the denial of the flesh. But they would have Him always with them, breathing in their souls.

When Luke continues the story into the Book of Acts, he notes that Jesus hung around for some forty days or so. At some point, He had the disciples return to Jerusalem. The final day is the final verses of Luke’s account. Jesus walked with them across the Kiddron Valley, up the long sloping climb over the crest of the Olivet Ridge, and almost into the village of Bethany. Given the circumstances, it’s quite likely this was near the end of that last day. The sun was low on the horizon behind the mount of Jerusalem.

He turned to face them one last time, the evening sun shining in His face. Lifting up His hands, He pronounced a blessing on them. He hardly finished His words when He levitated off the ground, rising quickly into the sky, catching more of the last rays of the sun. They watch Him go, and then turn back to their temporary gathering place in the Bethesda quarter of Jerusalem.

Luke tells us they worshiped daily in the Temple and stayed together in close fellowship for the next few days. There was no compelling reason yet to make a complete break from the Old Covenant worship rituals. There’s no doubt this puzzled the Sanhedrin and other officials. There was no hint of rebellion or even teaching for a while. Everything went quiet.

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The Judgment on Crypto Currencies

Posted on November 16, 2022 by ehurst

In general, believers should stay away from crypto-currency investment. Bear with me; it’s important to put this in proper perspective.

Jesus didn’t invent the two-point summary of the Covenant; He merely endorsed it, making it a central tenet in His New Covenant. It was a common teaching among Jewish rabbis for a long time.

And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

He said to him, “What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?”

So he answered and said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’”

And He said to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.” (Luke 10:25-28 NKJV)

Those who have promoted crypto-currencies are not good people. They indulge themselves in pagan idolatry of Mammon. We already know they don’t love God at all, so it’s no surprise they don’t love anyone else. They utterly fail the basic test of Biblical Law. Whatever good crypto-currencies might have done for mankind, they were hijacked immediately, and people who claim a Christian conscience cannot get involved.

Yes, there is such a thing as biblical economics. As a branch of Biblical Law, it starts with the assumption that human nature is fallen, and that we must build a culture and society that restricts the worst of human fallen tendencies. The whole point of Biblical Law is to mitigate the sorrows of living in a fallen mortal condition. It is God’s explanation of how to get by under the Curse of the Fall and have some hope of returning to Eden.

If you ignore revelation, your intellect and reason cannot possibly come up with a better system. Instead, you’ll be incapable of seeing the design and structure of reality as God made it, and you’ll end up proving that you deserve eternity under God’s wrath. Those who work in finance, banking, insurance and similar endeavors have built a blasphemous system that worships Mammon. There was never any intent to do good for anyone else.

It’s one thing to realize that you are limited in your reach; it’s another thing entirely to build a system that excludes all those people you will never meet personally.

There’s been a lot of noise lately about some scoundrel whom the MSM have popularized by his intials, SBF — Sam Bankman-Fried. He’s loudly denounced for claiming to manage other people’s money for them, but instead of getting them a good return on wise investments, he wasted it all. Not only did he not return a gain on their investments, but he can’t even return what they gave him. It’s gone. It’s the ultimate sin among those who worship Mammon.

Nobody bothers to notice how SBF was a filthy idolater in the first place. Yeah, he’s Jewish and screwing the Gentiles is part of that, but he screwed his Jewish investors, too. Jewish elites have always despised their own peasantry (see John 7:49). But those are their peasants and Gentiles had better keep their hands off. Jews are intensely tribal, but insist that Gentiles aren’t allowed to be tribal, as well. SBF was not really among the Jewish elite leadership; he was a protected scoundrel unleashed on the Gentile world. But he’s Jewish, and the Jewish elite will not allow the US government to do much to him.

It’s just part of the ongoing Jewish predation on the rest of the world. They insist Gentiles leave the door wide open for them to come in and plunder. We are not permitted to mark them and exclude them the way they do us. Meanwhile, as Solzhenitsyn noted in his book, Two Hundred Years Together, Jews produced nothing — nothing — to participate in the economy. They served only as middlemen who scraped off the production of everyone else without providing even so much as a good service of handling and redistributing the production of others. In other words, it was part of their ethnic tribal identity to insert themselves into the economy and consume everything they could get their hands on, passing on only what they didn’t want for themselves.

I’ve long taught that there’s nothing we can do about this. They are Satan’s special nation and he is the Prince of This World. As long as we live in this world, there is nothing we can do to change the situation. If we were to rise up and kill all the Jews, Satan would simply raise up another nation to serve him under the same tribal Talmudic rubric. Today’s Jews have almost no real Hebrew blood in the first place; the majority are actually Khazars, so get a clue. The Talmud is the premier guidebook on taking over the world.

(The only caveat is if we would actually gather into a covenant community large enough to exclude the worldly ways. That community must obey Biblical Law or the Lord will not protect it.)

This world is slated for destruction, so conquering it would net you nothing worth having. The whole point of Biblical Law is not conquest, but to keep you focused on leaving this world. The only conquest we have is over ourselves — to stop caring about this world, and to demonstrate our lack of interest by freely using material things to bless others. All that God gives us we are eager to part with so He can supply more. Damnation comes in the urge to accumulate. In particular, it’s the urge to accumulate for self, versus the urge to accumulate to share.

And it’s the urge to accumulate for self that damns crypto-currencies. Instead of using them to improve the economic flow, the vast majority of crypto is used to accumulate wealth, to aggravate the disparity between those who have and those who don’t. Jesus specifically condemned the accumulation of wealth for self (Luke 12:16-21). The whole point in having is to bless your tribe, but the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is the rest of the story I quoted from the Bible above, warns that God pays close attention to how you embrace a tribal identity.

The only valid tribal identity in His sight is based on moral affinity. Please note that a critical part of the definition of “affinity” is a relationship based on covenant or marriage, not DNA. The Good Samaritan obeyed Biblical Law, and was thus the “neighbor” God insisted we care for, while the ostensible fellow Jews of the victim were clearly not his neighbors.

SBF and everyone else involved in the crypto-currency craze are more like the wealthy and powerful in the parable who would hardly notice if someone was in distress. Those are not God’s people; they belong to Satan. Crypto-currencies are merely one more weapon aimed at destroying us little people.

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NT Doctrine — John 21

Posted on November 12, 2022 by ehurst

John was humble enough to make his final chapter about Peter, the appointed leader of the Twelve. This was his endorsement of that appointment, though he published his Gospel long after Peter and the others were dead for at last a decade or more. There’s more to this final narrative than meets the eye.

John tells us that this was the third time after His resurrection that Jesus met with His disciples. The previous two meetings were in Jerusalem around both ends of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. They left the city after that, and we find seven of them sitting around in Peter’s house in Capernaum, on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee.

Peter must have had a million questions in his mind about his place in the scheme of things. So as the sun began to set, he decided to return to the only thing he was sure about: fishing. It was his profession before both John the Baptist and Jesus showed up. It was the same profession for some of the others, but all of them must have worked at it some, as they all decided to join Peter for a night of fishing. It’s when fishing was done in those days. It’s when the fish would come up close to the surface to feed.

There would have been two boats — the larger for carrying the nets and their catch, and a dingy used to drag the net out and into a closed loop, sweeping any fish in the water back toward the bigger boat. Then the net was hauled up into the larger craft with whatever they caught. They were at it all night, catching nothing.

At the earliest light, a fellow on the nearest shore asked if they had caught anything. This would normally be a rather aggressive fish vendor trying to get first shot at their catch. Or maybe this was shore fisherman, because he suggested they try the other side of the boat, as if he knew where the fish were lurking. They tried it. Lo and behold, the net was so laden with fish they couldn’t haul it back up into the larger boat. At this point, John being in the crew on the boat that couldn’t lift the net, turned and told Peter it was Jesus.

Who could have forgotten a similar scene three years prior, when after a teaching session from the bow of their boat, Jesus suggested they take a run with the net in daylight when the fish had normally dropped in the depths away from the heat of the sunlight? The net that day began to tear from the massive catch.

But not this time. Still, it was too heavy to pull into the larger boat, so they dragged it ashore with the dingy. In his excitement, Peter had grabbed his outer garment — fishermen worked nearly naked — and dove into the water, swimming to shore to meet Jesus. The one who might question his commitment to Jesus was ready once again to abandon fishing to fish for men. He was there to meet the small boat with the net. Showing off for his large size and strength, Peter dragged it up on the beach. No, it was not torn this time, so it was easier to keep the whole catch together. They counted 153 unusually large specimens.

Jesus had already built a fire, with small fish cooking in the coals and some bread with it. He suggested they pick out something from their catch to add, so they could all have breakfast together. They knew it was Jesus, even if He didn’t appear quite the same as before His death. He served them breakfast as they all sat together in fellowship, just like old times.

When the meal was finished, right in front of everyone, Jesus turned to Peter. The big man’s heart must have stopped. Is this when he gets dismissed for his failure? It would only be justice. Instead, He simply asked if Peter loved Him. But typical of Jesus, He used a word John translated into the Greek word agape — in the context meaning a sacrificial kind of passionate commitment. Did Peter love Jesus above the rest of the group?

Peter had always been a big guy, with big boasting, worried too much what people thought of him, yet not really knowing himself. He often failed to follow through, as he had the night Jesus stood before the Sanhedrin. Over the past couple of weeks, that man had died, and here sat a new Peter, no longer deceived about what kind of man he was. He responded using a word John translates as phileo — he was still a friend of Jesus, but would not promise to sacrifice for Him.

It was almost as if to say, “That’s okay, Peter, pasture my flock” — take charge of the disciples. A few minutes passed, and then Jesus turned to Peter and asked the same question. Peter gave the same careful response. And again Jesus asked him to assume leadership of this group.

Yet again a few minutes, and Jesus turned to ask if they were still friends. Peter caught on to the change in words Jesus used, coming down to Peter’s level. While it stung, Peter was a chastened man and stood his ground for once. He was still willing to serve Jesus from his position as a flawed man. For once Peter was the solid rock about something. And again, Jesus said it was okay, that He still wanted Peter to assume leadership of the group. It was good enough for now.

Three times Peter had denied Jesus, and three times Jesus had affirmed that He still wanted Peter to take charge of this new ministry, despite Peter’s admitted imperfections. Then Jesus added that, all too soon, Peter would be forced to face death for even this level of commitment. He would be arrested and led to that death, same as his Lord. It was a prophecy that John saw come true some years later.

And what of the man who wrote this Gospel, the cousin of Jesus who seemed closer to Him personally than anyone else on earth? Jesus told Peter not to worry about it. John’s time would come, and it would be much later. Peter was the chief apostle for now. But the way Jesus said it was twisted by others into a myth, that somehow John would live until Jesus returned. John identifies himself as that man, and assured his readers that Jesus had done and said so many things that he still remembered, but writing it all down was an inhuman task.

By the time John published this Gospel, he was himself not far from dying as the last of the Twelve. His Gospel stands as a testimony to John’s urgent drive to teach the otherworldly, mystical approach to faith for a new generation that had never known Jesus or other other apostles.

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Ride Photos 18

Posted on November 10, 2022 by ehurst

This time I’ll start with a song that was going through my head the whole time I was riding to Draper, around it, and back.

It reflects the prayer that has been on my heart for quite some time now. I sang or hummed it to myself, and stopped several times at various places where it felt like a good prayer chapel.

When I left the house, the sun was shining. Within ten minutes, this cloud cover blew up from the south. By the time I got to the Draper Lake reserve, this is what it looked like. The promenade heading into the lake area cuts across the rather large prairie you see in this image. The weather prediction is that the heavy cloud cover would collide with a cold front coming out of the northwest.

This is one of several art installations installed around the lake. On one tiny point that has no number designation, there is this welded mosquito sculpture that looks like an airplane mounted atop a pole and spinning freely to face into the wind. The bench is really nice old wood carved into what you see here. It was a really nice prayer chapel, too.

This picnic table is one of my favorite stops. It sits between Point 1 on the east, and the Cross Timbers Off-road Riding Area on the west. It’s one of the better prayer chapels out here, too. In the far background is another art installation. Sometimes I wonder just how much money OKC spent on this stuff. They aren’t bad art pieces, but it’s almost silly when you consider how many of the docks and such need upgrading.

This is just one of the many coves the bikeway passes. The waves didn’t come out well in the picture, but the water was very active because of a stiff southerly breeze, the same one that brought this heavy cloud cover into the area. The other thing is that the water level is still very low on the lake. It doesn’t seem the water control folks are in a hurry to build it back up.

This was a spot on the bikeway that simply caught my eye at the moment I passed. I’m using my cellphone camera and was wondering how stuff like this would turn out when the sky is so heavily overcast. I need to read up on it, because sometimes the images come out slightly fish-eyed and sometimes nice and flat.

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Satanism A or B

Posted on November 9, 2022 by ehurst

There was no clean sweep in the elections. Redemption comes not from partisan politics. Ideology is a very poor substitute for national identity.

Genuine Christian faith is following Jesus to the Cross. The ultimate victory is leaving this world, not dominating it. Jesus could easily have taken over the governments of His world, but He deliberately sidestepped all of that. The ultimate conquest of the world is leaving all the cares of this world behind.

We are taught in the New Testament to nail our fleshly natures to the Cross. Not literally, of course, but it’s symbolism for bringing our fallen nature into subjection of our spiritual nature. We have to live in this world with a commitment outside this world.

Christian faith is not an ethnic identity, but it displaces ethnic identity. You can hold a commitment to all kinds of things. Most human pursuits are idolatry, but we are fundamentally wired to be tribal. The ultimate expression of human nature is not in ideals with the resulting civilizations and empires, but in the results of the Tower of Babel: God forced everyone to scatter into tiny ethnic tribes. That’s how nature itself is wired. Every aspiration of humanity outside of that existence is doomed to failure.

God will not tolerate us doing anything else. This is why there can never be one single religion or church for all of mankind. While living on this earth, following Christ means keeping ourselves in tiny enclaves of varied languages, customs, traditions and theologies.

You must understand that theology is man made. It is nothing more than the ruminations of one person seeking to organize the ineffable driving of the Holy Spirit within one or another context. The ideas themselves are not divine. If you can reason about it and put it into words, it’s man made. The ultimate divine truth is beyond words and mere mental apprehensions.

Thus, one man’s theology is another man’s lie from Hell. My blather about covenants and Eternity are just that; it’s my own formulation to give shape to my Kingdom service. You’ll need to formulate your own. They may well end up sounding a lot like mine, but that’s just a signal to us that we should work together in one way or another. In the final analysis, all we can really claim to know for sure is what God requires of us individually.

Your passion to glorify the Lord is what He counts as holiness. Then again, be careful that your passions are not simply the flesh running wild with an ill-considered zeal for something it does not really understand. The true passion of the Spirit leads to quiet contemplation, and only rarely to fiery action.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. The answers you believe God has given you may not work for someone else. This is especially true when it comes to organizing human activity. Do not pretend that church isn’t just another human activity. Our God commissioned the principle of acting on our faith, not your particular set of actions.

Thus, church activity is just politics, and it may or may not turn out well. Indeed, the outcomes will be all over the map, blessing some and defiling others. That’s what we should expect. That’s part of the Curse of the Fall. There can be no single definitive answer for every child of Adam and Eve.

All the more so is this true regarding secular politics. Satan is the master of all human activity not covered by the Covenant. The most you might say about the elections is that the two false tribes will continue to fight with no particular advantage to either side. God is not directly involved; it’s all been handed over to Satan because none of it is under the Covenant. Both sides are Satanic in one way or another.

Your Christian faith identity cannot be associated with any earthly tribe.

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People Need Jesus

Posted on November 6, 2022 by ehurst

Yeah, what he said.

I’ve been saying this for years: Jesus didn’t die on the Cross to open the way to Heaven. People died and went to Heaven ever since leaving the Garden of Eden. It has always been a matter of divine election. Whatever we might do about it is impossible to put into words, and the ancient Hebrews never discussed it for that very reason.

Jesus died on the Cross to open the Covenant. In particular, He commanded His disciples to share the revelation that was part or the Covenant. Prior to His sacrifice, the only path to revelation and enlightenment was through the Covenant of Moses or of Noah. Jesus took down the boundaries of Moses; in essence, all of humanity is now under Noah. However, it’s Noah informed by Moses.

Noah used to be a mysterious thing, hit and miss because there was no authoritative revelation. In Moses, the whole thing was cleared up. We have God Himself editing the mass of literature and traditions to clarify. That was the true blessing of Moses. And that blessing was incarnated in the nation of Israel, the People of God.

They refused their role. They slowly turned it into a racist thing, a matter of ethnic privilege. Moses is anything but that; the national identity was always a matter of the Covenant, not DNA. Jesus came along and restored the original intent of Moses, and then He closed it up and moved it all under Noah. Whatever it was that made Moses different from Noah was wiped away. The difference was not in morals nor promises from God, but rituals. Jesus took away the ritual identity, and moved everything into the moral realm.

It’s not that you shouldn’t care about going to Heaven; it’s that you cannot understand it from a human level. All the talk about “how to go to Heaven” is inherently false, because you cannot talk about it without resorting to parables and symbols. It’s restricted to the language of the heart.

The only thing we can talk about is how to get inside, and stay inside, the boundaries of the Covenant. That’s what we preach and discuss and witness to others. That’s the thing that put Jesus on the Cross. Talk to people about how we can gain God’s favor in this life; talk about the Covenant boundaries. Talk about the terms and conditions of being welcomed into His household as adopted family.

This mortal existence is not what God made us for. This is a punitive accursed existence. We are supposed to escape it. The initial part of that escape is the Covenant revelation of how to mitigate this awful situation we are in. Whatever we might do to gain God’s favor and enter Heaven is bound up in the Covenant.

Everyone needs the Covenant. When the New Testament said, “to the Jew first, and to the Greek” it was the same as saying today, “to the church folks first and those outside the churches”. Do you realize that “Jews” did not mean necessarily that they were fully under the Covenant, but that they were simply under the jurisdiction of the Judean government? That’s what “Jew” means — it’s short for Judean. Well, our equivalent today would be “churchian”; it’s a reference to human jurisdictions.

The only thing Jesus ever talked about was restoring the Covenant to its original intent so that it could be fulfilled and closed. He was opening a new covenant in His blood, and that’s what He told us to teach in the Great Commission. The mental assumptions of church folks is today just as badly flawed as the mental assumptions of Jews in their day.

The Covenant of Christ is a covenant on this earth rooted in Heaven. In that sense, it’s part of a continuum with any previous covenants from God. That’s how God deals with fallen humanity. The issue is joining His household to the extent possible in our current situation. If the Apostles took their gospel message to Jews and Gentiles, then we take our gospel message of the Covenant to anyone outside that Covenant. And it’s for sure, most church folks are not observing the boundaries of the Covenant of Christ. They are under a church government for their religion, but that government is no more accurate and effective than the Jewish government of Jesus’ day.

To say “people need Jesus” does not refer to church, but to the Covenant. The Covenant is not church religion; it is not what institutional leaders say it is. The Covenant is Noah (as informed by Moses), delineated in all the various declarations in the New Testament as to what is good and righteous behavior. Just as Paul warned Timothy to discern what part of the Old Testament applies under Christ, and how it applies, so you and I these many centuries later must discern how the code of New Testament behavior applies to us.

People need Jesus; they need His Covenant.

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