Do You Even Have a Witness?

Posted on October 12, 2021 by ehurst

People who claim to be politically conservative in the US cannot be trusted to do any good. They are committed to preserving the system, but the system has been hijacked completely by the progressives. It’s gone; it cannot be recovered by any means. There will be no victories coming from elections, representation, the courts and other systemic provisions for expressing the will of the people.

Were the conservatives serious about solving problems, they would have already noticed this and begun the organized revolt they keep threatening. By the time some significant minority of them wake up and act, it will be the extremists who aren’t actually “conservative” because surrender and compromise is a fundamental trait of conservatives.

You and I as covenant people have no representatives in the system, and no safe haven. There is no one who will give us political cover in the current system. It is run by the cattle for the cattle, and the sheep of God’s pasture have no place in their operations. We don’t belong in the open plains, as it were, but in the mountains where we are harder to reach (social parables, of course).

This is part of why I keep calling for covenant people to pull away from the ambient society. There is no place for us there. We must withdraw into covenant households of faith; we must seek enclaves where we have some reasonable chance to cling to covenant life. To some degree, literal enclaves will not be available for most of us. What that means is that we must be creative in each of our scattered lives in this Twilight Zone in finding ways to withdraw as much as possible. Get your mind focused in that direction. Pray for His provision and guidance, and seize the opportunities as the Lord provides.

When the economic collapse gets farther down the road, it will become an utter necessity that we learn to live with other covenant people in extended family households simply to survive. It’s going to get that bad. Get ready for it. The situation will require us to be nimble and ready to jump. Follow your convictions.

It is not possible to obey the commands of Christ in the current system. Have you noticed that organized religion is wholly compromised? Churches that aren’t already subverted to progressive “wokeness” are conservative, in that they refuse to abandon the system. They would rather keep compromising and surrendering things our Lord commanded. They want the material wealth that comes from seeking to get the system to take them seriously.

We should be able to see by now that there is no way a covenant lifestyle will ever be taken seriously by the secular system. By embracing Christ’s teachings, we have become their enemy. Sadly, it makes us the enemy of mainstream churches, too. There is nothing we can do about this. Thus, we must accept the reality of things and act accordingly. I’m not suggesting that you run away and hide from your witness. I’m suggesting that if you don’t pull away and accept the rejection and persecution as normal, then you do not have a witness in the first place.

This is what Christ commanded. This is how we have a witness; this is how we teach them all that our Lord has commanded us and fulfill the Great Commission. If it gets us impoverished, persecuted and killed, that’s part of our witness. The times have turned and it’s going to be as bad as things ever were under Rome in the New Testament era.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

New Testament Doctrine — Addenda 01

Posted on October 11, 2021 by ehurst

This will be inserted into our series of lessons showing the continuity between the Old and New Testaments.

We have just finished an examination of Matthew 5:17-48 in several lessons. A critical element is that you understand the context: The whole Sermon on the Mount is a restoration of the Covenant. The Covenant is far more than the Law Code of Moses. The Covenant is a personal commitment to Jehovah as your feudal Lord and Father.

So over the previous few centuries, the Jewish leadership had continually departed from that high moral standard of a personal, heart-led loyalty to God. Even before the Return and Restoration, the Covenant was emptied of that personal loyalty issue, and the Law Code became rote behavior. This shows up in the Post-Exilic prophets, calling and calling for the people to give their hearts to the Lord.

In Jesus’ day, the leadership in resisting that call were the Scribes and Pharisees. They had fully institutionalized the doctrine that rote performance was exactly what God wanted. It was a perversion of what God had said about Himself. In their twisted imaginations, this legalistic nit-picking was how God Himself operated and what He expected, and even admired, about the Pharisaical rabbinical school of thought. It was a blatantly false image of Jehovah.

Thus, the key phrase for this passage is what Jesus said to His audience, warning them that their obedience to God was a far higher standard than that of the Scribes and Pharisees. They didn’t even qualify for the most basic level of citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Then Jesus proceeds to run down a series of moral principles that were as old as Noah. Keep in mind that a basic understanding here is that Noah was easier and more generic than Moses. And the Pharisees couldn’t even be bothered to obey that easy standard. They worked night and day establishing theory and court precedents to avoid having to obey even that much.

And these items Jesus cited were just the bare minimum that God required for mankind to live on the earth without reverting to the moral chaos before the Flood. With each basic principle, Jesus points out how it masks the very much higher moral truth of God’s personality. If you want to stand in the Presence of God, it will require a driving desire to please Him. To please Him requires that you grasp the fundamental nature of righteousness as the moral orientation of God, and you have to want it for yourself.

Mere rote obedience is just enough to keep Him from wiping you off the earth. If you want Him to smile, to actually impress Him and gain His loving attention, you must be like a child who struggles to grasp what God is actually trying to accomplish. Trying to approach it like an adult, as if there were some potential to work as equals, was a blasphemous insult. He longs for humans to come to Him like children.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New Testament Doctrine — Addenda 01

Testing Is Vaccinating

Posted on October 10, 2021 by ehurst

If you understand how viruses work, you’ll recognize that most of what we see being shoved at us is unnecessary — unless there is something else going on here. The mandates that you submit to frequent testing is just another way to slip in the vaccine without informed consent.

There are numerous allegations that the test swabs are coated with some portion of the vaccines. Medical doctors are saying this after examining the testing materials. If someone were actually testing for the presence of a virus, it would be in your saliva, so a regular cheek swab is sufficient. The insertion of a long swab into the back of your throat is actually aiming for a spot where your sinus passages are just a few millimeters from your brain. There’s a small spot there near the top of your sinus cavities where the brain case is very thin and porous. The swab is coated with nanoparticles.

Feel free to look up “vaccine nanoparticles” and you’ll see in the official literature how essential they are to the plan. These nanoparticles carry the spike proteins across all the various physical barriers in your body, and that includes the blood-brain barrier. What the literature won’t tell us is that the whole point is to displace some of your own DNA with an artificial section they concocted to make your body produce the spike proteins. That’s the only purpose for injecting mRNA, because that’s what RNA is for. They want that stuff hosted in your brain, because the spike proteins cause micro-clots in the blood, reducing your mental capacity.

So getting tested means getting a low-dose vaccination. There’s absolutely no valid medical reason for this. It’s just another small part of the trickery and deceit aimed at forcing this slow death toxin into every body possible. Watch for it in other folks who’ve been tested. While some people are resistant, the average person will, sooner or later, start to exhibit a reduced reasoning capacity. Intellectual operations slow down; they appear to be lost and disoriented in small ways.

The thing with all the propaganda is to disable resistance. If they demand a reason for declining the vaccine, that drags you into their territory. They own the turf for discussion. So the only valid response is not to discuss it. Simply say, “No, I don’t have to give you a reason.” End it there. These people are not your friends; they are the enemy. They are determined to kill you one way or another, and the easiest path is to get your voluntary compliance. When you recognize that the nurses and other medical folks aiming that needle at you are the enemy trying to kill you, it makes things a lot clearer in your mind. Don’t trust them, at least not on this issue.

So a reminder: There are multiple paths of toxicity in the vaccines. One part is designed to destroy your white blood cells along with any other natural defenses. Another part is designed to hijack your DNA so that your body produces the spike proteins, and your system will be flooded with them. These proteins do more damage, causing blood clots for example. There are other toxins in there whose effects are not widely understood, but it’s quite possible some of the nanoparticles containing metal are designed to be reactive to various electromagnetic impulses. That part would be much harder to prove, and it’s likely something being saved for later use.

Yes, I’m a crazy anti-vaxxer and maybe even a terrorist by some definitions. Nobody is forcing you to read this blog. But I’m hoping to make you aware of things I can verify, to whatever degree I can verify them. We live in the Twilight Zone; the deception is so pervasive that it’s impossible to explain. This is only one small part of the massive blood guilt hanging over the USA.

Update: Just hang on a while longer. By winter, and snowballing into spring, we should see a sudden rise in critical illness and fatalities due to the damage from the vaccines. A medical system that has dismissed a significant minority for refusing the vaccines will face an earthshaking crisis: heart failures, ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease (strokes), and other circulatory diseases will dominate.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Testing Is Vaccinating

New Testament Doctrine — Matthew 5:33-48

Posted on October 9, 2021 by ehurst

This passage is not without context. Jesus is embarrassing the Scribes and Pharisees for their moral hypocrisy. He has entered upon a list of issues in which the Jewish leadership have defied God’s revelation going all the way back to Eden. If you attempt to stand these teachings as stated in our modern Western context, you will seriously miss the point. They are not free standing absolutes; they exist within the context of a nation Jesus seeks to restore to her covenant with God.

In these ancient principles, we see the first step toward salvaging the human condition from the Fall. They provide an initial warning, a minimal boundary that gives notice that we are sinners, because we don’t even want to obey these, as easy as they are. This is how they were supposed to be understood. Those whose hearts were awakened by these low boundaries would then turn inward and seek to understand the wretched condition of their souls and cry out for redemption. We’ve been given a glimpse at the murderous hatred and uncontrollable lust of the flesh. The Scribes and Pharisees looked for ways to circumvent even these primitive warnings, and claimed that God approved of their ways.

For example, they were notorious for making high sounding oaths to Jehovah that turned out to be empty. It was carefully worded so that they were not actually bound by anything. Anytime one of them swears generously like that, you need to run the other way, because they will stab you in the back. Jesus notes that from ancient times it was forbidden to make an oath before God and not carry it through. There was a reverence for avoiding blasphemy and defaming God in the presence of other people. However, it was widely known that Scribes and Pharisees kept a list of legalistic word choices that were legally binding, and plenty that were not.

Jesus says flatly that the whole business is blasphemous. Why would you need an oath in the first place? Just do what you say consistently, and no one will ever need to ask for an oath. They’ll know you honor God from your heart regardless of the context.

Who could forget the ancient Law of Retaliation? It was a remarkable achievement in restoring balance between feuding parties, each demanding a premium recompense for some slight. Very early in human history it became the law of great rulers to squash that nonsense and demand penalties that equaled the offense, and nothing more. Thus, if you poked out someone else’s eye, they could demand nothing more than your eye be poked out. No escalation was permitted.

Jesus said that you should drop the pretense of privileged victimhood. This life is not worth anything in the first place, so trying to break even in human terms will divert you from the path back to Eden. If you are determined to find God’s throne, then don’t waste time chasing the anxieties of human existence. People who belong to Heaven aren’t much worried about the bumps and bruises that pitiful lost souls dish out.

Is someone else in such desperate straits that they’ll take part of your clothing? Give them all but your underwear. God will provide for your covering. If someone is going to use Roman Law to make you carry his military gear a mile, carry it another mile to show that you value something else much higher than mere convenience. Do it as unto the Lord. Give to beggars and those who always borrow but can’t repay. Your Father will provide what you need for His purpose in Your life. Show the world that you belong to a higher plane.

It’s like another ancient instruction that you should love your neighbor and save your spite for enemies. This is the foundation for much of the Covenant: Your fellow Israeli is your family. If you can’t love at least some people, you are dead already. Even tax collectors are friends with people friendly to them. The Scribes and Pharisees were notorious for despising everyone who wasn’t part of their in-group. There was a modicum of public respect for their fellow rabbis, as long as they struggled to excel within the artificial rabbinical system. But behind the scenes, they were downright vicious with each other over the smallest petty insults. They looked for ways to skirt their obligations under the Law of Moses on such things.

Jesus says the Law is just the starting point. Do you want to please Your Heavenly Father? Find a way to love even your enemies. Nobody says you have to tolerate the destruction of shalom, but you need to understand what peace with God actually is. When you show that your love is stronger than human hatred, your enemies will be hammered with conviction for their sins (Jesus said elsewhere).

Do you notice how God treats those who hate His commands? He sends the same rain on the just and unjust. Think about how you can emulate that. There are some measures of respect and kindness that simply apply to humans that God has put in your life; you are supposed to offer care on His behalf. God is like any other ruler, in that He proposes minimum standards to keep everyone in His realm from killing each other. However, those who serve in His court are a cut above that sort of gutter justice.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Don’t Overly Simplify Things

Posted on October 9, 2021 by ehurst

Part 1: The Moral Issue

So there were some questions regarding yesterday’s post. Maybe I can answer them sufficiently. I’ve looked into this in some detail.

Keep in mind that we do not appeal to the outsiders, via social pressure or political agitation, except in the most rare of circumstances. They do what they do. We strive to separate ourselves from them as much as possible. There are inevitable intersections, and we must act on our convictions and faith.

In the Bible, the life of the mother comes before the baby. If her conscience is clear, if her choice is by conviction to end the life of her unborn child for some medical necessity, then there is no blood guilt. And how rare is that? It is so highly unlikely that we can say with some assurance that there are no justified abortions. Every unborn baby, with the most rare exceptions, is aborted with blood guilt defiling everyone involved.

So-called “quality of life” arguments are dead from the start. It has to be her life and clear conscience before God.

In a broad general sense, the lives of everyone involved are all forfeit at that point. The Word does offer opportunities for repentance, and there are measures of clemency for various reasons. Cain was marked but not executed right away. However, in general, the doctrine is that there is blood guilt defiling the people involved, who then in turn put a heavy burden of blood guilt on the natural world. Creation cries out for justice.

Their death sentence is latent; I can’t think of any other way to word it. It’s there waiting to fall on them when they cross some invisible line that you and I may not see. This is the Code of Noah that still applies until there are no longer any rainbows on this earth. That includes the entire medical staff involved, all the family and friends who supported and sponsored this foul act, and every government officer who makes it legally possible. And the same defilement and blood guilt falls on anyone who handles the aborted remains contrary to Scripture. Those remains become sacred, and must be given proper reverent burial to avoid being defiled.

So any medical work done with fetal cells is also accursed with blood guilt. And every medical product of such work is accursed, along with all the people who knowingly handle and use that product. All the way down to the patient who consumes that product, everyone in the chain of custody for every cloned fetal cell and everything that is produced using those fetal cells is accursed. They carry a latent death sentence.

The wrath of God abides on them. At His behest, they will die for it. But this does not answer all the questions.

Part 2: The Practical Matter

Now, all of this raises the issue: Just what medications were created and manufactured using fetal cells? We know for certain that all but one of the COVID vaccines were (Novavax uses no such tissue in their development). But are there other medications we need to worry about? To be brutally honest, the use of fetal cell clones in testing seems to touch every medication in use today. The practice is ubiquitous.

This has been tracked, as you might expect, by various pro-life organizations. For them, the question is not so much morals as ethics. As you might expect, the guidance of the Vatican figures large such discussions. They make distinctions between those medications that could not exist without such research versus those that existed long before such research became common (see this post, for example). We don’t stand with them fundamentally, but there is so little information out there unless you read their stuff.

I’ve been attacked by people in the pro-life political movement for not being sufficiently supportive of their cause. Their doctrines rest on Western assumptions, and do not come from the Bible. It’s a major element that drove me away from mainstream churches. Where do you draw the line under the Radix Fidem covenant?

Even food companies are involved in the abuse of fetal remains, simply because they sell stuff that isn’t just plain food. Much of what you eat includes additives that require various levels of medical testing, and sometimes the only testing possible involves fetal tissue somewhere in the process. Almost every testing lab uses fetal tissue. And you cannot trust the US labeling laws about “organic” foods, since the legal definition bears little resemblance to plain English.

And then there is the legally mandated testing of all kinds of products like paint, solvents, plastics, etc., all being tested in labs that use fetal tissue. You cannot escape it. Our world is so utterly defiled and immoral that almost everything you touch carries blood guilt. It puts us squarely in the question of food offered to idols. In this case, abortion is very much rooted in the ancient worship of Moloch. At what point can you hold the people accountable, when it’s the evil of the whole system, and this was well established before they were even born, much less before they started working with it? You cannot stand for fall on this one issue of whether something uses aborted baby tissues. We are up to our ears in this stuff.

I’ve already outlined that the real problem with COVID treatment protocols and vaccines is that they were established on the premise of reducing the human population. That’s about as defiled as it gets, since the fundamental purpose is shedding innocent blood. Not that the victims are innocent in themselves — human birth into a mortal form is defiling in itself. Rather, the decision to slaughter the masses is Satanic in itself. You cannot justly kill them blindly as mere numbers. The only justifications for taking human life is laid out clearly in Biblical Law, and without a proper feudal covenant community behind it, all human government is damned before the people involved do anything at all.

Purity in this life is not a literal possibility, but a clear conscience is. As noted in my teaching long ago, context is everything. You cannot simply play the intellectual game of legalism. Otherwise, you would be obliged to either commit suicide to avoid every taint of evil, or you would have to go to war on all human governments in existence today, along with virtually every human culture.

Obviously I’m not going to organize an armed resistance here in the US to avoid the vaccines. If you are blessed enough to live in a state whose government tells Biden and friends to go take a hike on this issue, then you would be hard put to justify any kind of violence. Such a resistant government is doing what God has commanded all governments to do, at least on that one issue. Such a government qualifies for the response Paul suggests in Romans 13. Let them handle it; my state is like that.

But that we are coming into the time when our covenant of faith will mean resistance to sin that could see us bleed and die is not in doubt. If it’s not vaccine mandates, it’s probably something else down the road a little way. The tribulation is just beginning. Know the boundaries. Clarify them to the extent possible before you face the tests. Learn to read your convictions.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Don’t Overly Simplify Things

Again: Come Out from Among Them

Posted on October 8, 2021 by ehurst

Saying that “abortion is murder” misses the point.

Big Pharma flat out lied about the use of fetal tissue in vaccine development. Babies died to make these vaccines.

Edit: The primary issue here is not the use of fetal tissue, which is evil, but that they lied about it.

Let me unwind the biblical position here. The world at large is going to Hell. That’s both literally and figuratively true. It’s more important to understand the latter, that this is a metaphor, a parable of spiritual truth. We’ve said time and time again that the issue isn’t whether you go to Heaven. God alone controls that and there is absolutely nothing any human can do to alter their eternal destiny. All this business of chasing spiritual birth completely misses what Jesus said to Nicodemas that night. We don’t pursue it; spiritual birth is necessary to understand what is happening here in our fallen world. It is necessary to understand revelation and redemption. It’s not a matter of whether you are spiritually born, but whether you are operating from that basis. In other words, there is no place to start until you have become aware of your spiritual birth.

The point of saying that the world at large is going to Hell is that they don’t know how to live after the Fall. Lacking that awareness of spiritual destiny, they cannot possibly get a clue about the Creator’s character and purposes in human existence. So the issue is to awaken the spirits of the Elect, and to point them to revelation so they can fulfill their purpose. There is nothing we can do for the rest of humanity. We can’t really know one way or another, but that is precisely why we focus our understanding on the at-large shape of human nature first, then we decide how we are going to handle each individual we encounter in this life.

So we have no business at all pretending that we can appeal to fallen society or fallen governments to stop the slaughter of innocents. Everything they do is sin; changing the rules doesn’t make it better. This is their show. Their father/god is Satan. The Lord owns Satan, but has granted him a certain level of power and control in this fallen world. You and I as children of that higher power can do certain things to resist that damnatory power, but it doesn’t include changing government and social customs. What it includes is the power to see clearly how God wants us to live, and some measure of the power to act on that. However, the power to act is limited.

A primary means to resist damnation is to create spheres of divine dominion. As long as innocent babies are being slaughtered for the convenience of their mothers, the land is defiled and wrath is due all under that dominion. By striving toward making literal enclaves of un-assimilated micro-societies, we create a separate dominion that reclaims and washes some space clean for our use. We deny that we belong to the damned world around us, and are not party to their sins.

So while government and society make “legal” claims to the turf on which we stand, a higher authority in Heaven recognizes the sacredness of the ground on which we gather as distinct and separate people. If we occupy it and use it, to the degree we manage to do so to the exclusion of outsiders, to that degree the land is purified. We have plenty of room here for virtual control and virtual territory; it doesn’t have to be literal. But the literal is a good thing if we can get it.

This is why we must separate as literally as possible; this is why we have enclaves and “ghettos” of holiness whenever we can make it happen. We withdraw from the stains of their evil and guilt. We denounce their sins as sin and refuse to participate. There is nothing to gain trying to change them; let them go to Hell if they want. The only way God is going to bless them is if there is a safe place to go, and we are that safe place. This is what Christian Mysticism is all about.

The more people who belong under my covering, the more literal my righteous control will be. The only reason we ask the Lord for more souls is because we stand in the background of the natural world around us groaning to be set free from sin. We want to rescue as much as we can, people and nature and our own lives all together. So within the current context, we each strive to make as real and literal as possible the existence of a holy enclave, while at the same time making our witness visible to rest of the world. Each covenant family household must find their own balancing point between visibility and separation.

Yes, the evil outsiders will cross the line. They will demand that we wallow in their filth. In particular, the American tradition is to claim people within the jurisdictional boundaries as economic assets “for the national good.” We must resist to the degree possible. Each of us must search our own convictions and see what God requires of us in drawing and maintaining the boundaries. There is no single rule of religion that fits all people in all cases. We are commanded to recognize a sliding scale that is valid before the Lord. At the same time, we must recognize that none of us is required to go along with another servant of the Lord. This is why holiness requires that each of us draw our own personal boundaries, too. And then we turn around and commune with others who share enough of our boundaries that fellowship is tolerable, and living together daily is possible.

God will most surely move His children in ways that make these living and flexible boundaries turn into congregations. There will always be someone out there in His service who will be led enough like you to fellowship and act like a family.

For me, in my Kiln of the Soul covenant household, as covering elder in my personal parish — If you want my covering, you’ll have to understand that I am willing to shed evil blood to prevent having innocent blood injected into my body. You want to be part of my faith family? Get used that idea. Sharing in innocent blood defiles too much; that’s more than I’m willing to do. And the New Testament does mention “resistance to the shedding of [our own] blood.” I’m willing to die on that ground, within those boundaries. It doesn’t mean I can’t accept into fellowship people who have taken the vaccines, but you will have to recognize that I can’t cover you on that point of sin. You are outside of my covering there; you are on your own when it comes to that defilement. The fellowship will have to accept my point of resistance, and my encouragement of others to do the same.

But if you want to call me your elder/pastor, then I’ll be glad to sign your exemption forms as religious leader. A fat lot of good it will do, but I’m willing to paint that target on myself. Harvesting tissue is not morally separate from killing a fetus. Once innocent blood is shed, the moral obligation of the righteous is to mournfully handle the remains in toto as sacred. Voluntary organ donation is not the same thing; the babies did not consent to anything. Still, the real best hope here is to live in a state/jurisdiction that rejects federal mandates.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

He Is the Law

Posted on October 6, 2021 by ehurst

There is no clear and logical break point. When we talk about renewing the Covenant, you are not supposed to start thinking in precise definition of terms. That’s the wrong approach to anything regarding faith and religion. You are supposed to turn inward and seek the Lord’s divine Presence to tell you what you really need to know about.

Words are not containers of meaning with precise definition. Words are used as signboards pointing the way to territory in your soul that needs exploring. The entire meaning of Radix Fidem is more about tossing away bad habits that restrict you from the full heritage of God’s Kingdom, than it is about new definitions. The idea is to set you free from the chains, from the lies of our culture so that you can begin exploring what God has for you.

“The Covenant” refers to your personal commitment to Christ. It is a covenant with boundaries that define privileges, not restrictions. You don’t have to let sin rule in your mortal bodies; you can embrace the boundaries of God that keep you out of Satan’s territory. He provides the power and the wisdom to choose. All you bring to it is the desire burning in your heart to please Him.

It’s really that simple.

What you then make of the Bible — the written record of experiences with those boundaries — in terms of guiding your religion, is between you and Christ. The next task is to discern who it is He wants you to work with. You can fellowship with almost anyone, but to actually form a community and engage the task of fighting the Enemy requires a commonality, which naturally means an exclusion of folks who aren’t close enough to make communion possible. You don’t sin by coming up with a different answer than mine, but you do limit yourself from communion with me when your answers are too different in too many places. Go find someone else to work with; you have my blessings as you search.

Fighting the Enemy is heavy on discerning whether the people you encounter are family, allies or outsiders. Fighting the Enemy is properly handling those folks based on your best heart-led assessment, and observing the boundaries the Bible outlines for each category. It means discriminating. It means not throwing your pearls to swine, or feeding offerings to dogs. It means tolerating a lot of social pressure because you will be quite different in your human habits in order to please the Father. It means focusing on the hard work of relating to other humans appropriately, according to how they position themselves within the structure of reckoning our God requires us to hold forth as our witness.

In many ways, Israel was an experiment that proved this is way things have to be. You cannot create a large nation based on human organization, even when that organization follows precisely what divine revelation required. It’s not that His Word failed, but that people in large groups are too badly broken to seize the blessings. The human tendency under human structure is destructive. It’s not possible for written revelation to do much more than provide a stable environment for seeking spiritual unity. You still have to do the work — every individual — to seek the Lord’s face in a very personal union with His Spirit. He revealed that it would fail to some degree, even when human potential reaches its maximum.

We do have the mitigation that God will place His hand on a community with solid spiritual leadership, but this doesn’t solve the basic problem. Rather, it means that He sponsors a miraculous atmosphere in which individuals are encouraged to grow in the Spirit. In other words, it only works when a Law Covenant is used as an incubator, not when it’s used as the final product. The bulk of Israeli people in the Bible narrative were always trying to make it out as the product, except when they were trying to make it the incubator for a less spiritual life.

So the only real answer is to make sure that every little congregation, every little extended household of faith, is as independent as possible. The multitude of households can then associate or disassociate as the context dictates while each seeks to find their own path of Covenant obedience. It’s meant to be an ebb and flow. It’s meant to be alive.

Organization and unity across the bodies is not a major requirement of faith. What matters most is the daily dynamic of people within a given body struggling to keep faith alive in how they fellowship and commune. The work is simply being together, of always seeking that balance point that permits individual calling within the nest of love and support that family households provide. It’s enabling the individual path of spiritual development. That’s what churches do. How you balance between the individual versus the group is part of the variables you have to adjust moment by moment.

Growing in numbers is more or less automatic as a side-effect; it’s not a valid goal in itself. Too much of it is in God’s hands. Touching the lives of those around you is a goal, whether they join the body or not. “Reaping souls ready for harvest” does not mean persuading them to join your church. It means touching them with spiritual fire and loving them regardless what they do. But that touching of lives must take place within the boundaries of the Covenant, and the actual on-the-ground reality of what that looks like is variable and dynamic, as the Spirit leads. The specifics of the boundaries are set by your community leadership in a dynamic atmosphere. It’s a lot of give and take and God really does want you to be feudal about it. It’s a burden on you to work with your leaders, but it’s an even bigger burden on them to misjudge and then clean up the mess it makes.

Growing the budget is merely a human factor that means damned little. Growing facilities? Are you stupid? Such things are not sacred. Budget and facilities are just tools, things you can abandon when they no longer serve the purpose of the day. Be faithful with divine provision, but never hesitate to walk away from some merely physical infrastructure that can’t follow you into the future. The people come first, and that’s not just a slogan. This is a family household, not a corporation. It’s a tribal family that owns property in common, but obeys the decisions of the human head of household in disposition of that physical property.

It’s the give and take that sees elders typically appointed for life and die, but then also quit, or sometimes be deposed. It’s the kind of thing where priestly folks can keep out of such concerns while keeping an eye and hand on the spiritual health of the family. There can be protocols, but rules tend to bend and break in the real world. It’s taking for granted some of the nitty-gritty of human turmoil as the testing ground against which you strive to shine the Lord’s glory. The church doesn’t have to “succeed” as humans measure such things. It succeeds simply by adhering to the process.

So this business of emphasizing the Covenant is not really about Biblical Law, but it will appear that way to those who don’t see from the heart. We emphasize Biblical Law in the flesh, but that’s because it’s just a parable of walking with Christ. Christ is Biblical Law. We seek to manifest the divine moral character through something that we call “law” because that’s the English word for what God speaks to His servants. His personality is the real “law” and we are just trying to capture something of that personality by pointing out boundaries that seem to make some limited sense to the fleshly intellect.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on He Is the Law

Acts Commentary Revision for Printing

Posted on October 5, 2021 by ehurst

AT-Acts is ready now. This is how I spent my whole day, working on this.

Meta: I have been expecting Microsoft to do something stupid in the near future. Recently they have completely alienated me by something that is actually minor in the broader picture, but a show-stopper for me. The online version of Word now has forced the issue of styles. If I load a document with the default styles modified, it changes them to something MS has decided is the only way to do things. In order to keep my paragraph styles, I’m forced to rename them something not already defined by MS, which causes problems in every other system that imports the DOCX format. That means it messes things up in Google Docs and LibreOffice, and it’s major pain to get everything back where it belongs. I’m not using any part of the MS Office Online any longer.

I suppose this is what the Lord knew was coming when He moved me to drop Windows and Office a couple of months ago. The only reason I can offer anything in DOCX format is because Google Docs uses it natively, and LibreOffice can export to several formats other than their own ODT. Be forewarned folks, once all of my current books are reformatted, all my future books will be offered in other formats, but I won’t be messing with MS Office stuff any more.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Personal: Printers and Knees

Posted on October 4, 2021 by ehurst

I now have an office grade HP printer, thanks to a donor, and thanks to your prayers.

Keep praying with me about my knees. I saw an orthopedic surgeon at the VA today. My right knee, the one that has seen lots of abuse and surgeries already, could be about due for replacement because it already had some bad spots back in 2016. It is rather stiff and hurts pretty much all the time now. The left knee has a torn meniscus, but is a very long way from replacement by his reckoning. So the issue is pain management. I’ll be receiving a couple of prescriptions and I have a new knee brace (the left knee won’t benefit much from it). I need to use my legs, but carefully. He recommended some changes in my physical therapy routine, and says that rowing is a good replacement for my aerobic fitness plans.

So I suppose now I’ll pray about a rowing machine and/or a watercraft for our many artificial lakes around here. Someone has already asked me: I have zero experience with kayaks. I’m well experienced with canoes and rowboats. I don’t have any place to keep that kind of stuff, but it’s a nice dream. Maybe if there was some kind of storage for such things I could use, it might be more realistic. I may just barely accommodate a small rowing machine in my apartment.

I’m keeping my wheelchair for things like shopping.

Posted in personal | Tagged , | Comments Off on Personal: Printers and Knees

Keep Your Eyes on the Road Home

Posted on October 3, 2021 by ehurst

God alone knows what’s coming. He does tip His hand on some issues; He’s been very consistent about calling prophets every time He plans to bring His wrath. Granted, we have a surfeit of “prophets” trying to profit from the masses, but there is also a thread of consistent biblical warnings if you look for them.

And it never hurts to get some good analysis from smart people. God put them in place, as well, even if the wise voice doesn’t publicly acknowledge Him. As long as you can discern what they actually know about, it gives you a chance to make a realistic assessment of some things.

I keep saying that I believe we are headed for an apocalypse, or more accurately, a near-apocalypse. It’s not the end of the world; there are too many elements missing from the picture. But it will be one hellacious mess, and we do well to make our best guess about those things we can identify.

For example, we know that Satan is not what most churchians claim. Too much Western mythology has been mixed into the picture. Just look at at the popular fiction of the day making Satan out be something like Loki in Norse mythology, mostly by presenting some image of Loki and calling it “satanic.” That’s why I’ve invested so much time in trying to explain the biblical image, which is quite different. Satan is God’s punisher, and the cowboy that herds the spiritual cattle who refuse to acknowledge our Creator appropriately.

Thus, we know that Satan has no particular agenda except to deceive people who are willing to be deceived about God and His revelation. That’s his job, not his desire. The job is the punishment for his mistakes. It shows up in all that false mythology about himself. A major element of the Big Lie is the truth that Satan has stolen the heart-led way from Western consciousness, and wants everyone to stick with intellect and emotion. There is a very real battle between conservative versus liberal, but that’s not our fight, because neither side is heart-led. The idolatry of both sides is pretty empty of any kind of genuine commitment.

So, for example, the globalist-leftist axis has almost no truly committed souls. The progressive half of the US is almost entirely fake and empty. The people have had their souls stolen by the Western mythology, so they are flatly incapable of committing their lives to this agenda. It’s just a shallow appeal, but that’s as deep as they go. When a real war breaks out, they won’t be willing to die for their ideals. They only imagine that they would stand up to the last man/woman/thing.

And Satan has them all convinced that it will work. Having been inside of the NATO structure in Europe, I agree with Brandon Smith that the UN would actually be willing to send troops of some sort to support the collapsing globalists in the coming US second civil war. You should scan the comments with the linked article.

We are well past the point of preventing the war, and actually winning is questionable simply because we cannot yet see where God is taking all of this. All we can say is that decentralization is coming at God’s hand. The war will be global in nature, in that things are being manipulated that way all over the world. It’s not just the US. Russia and China are both different brands of globalist (pushing vaccines), just a whale of lot more intelligent about it than their US counterparts. They would both be glad to invade the Americas if they thought it would gain them the resources they need.

There’s no discernible pattern on how things will turn out. In my spirit, I sense that it won’t really matter. In my head, I suspect the political landscape will change so dramatically that we can’t possibly imagine it from where we are now.

What we can know is that conflict is coming, and there’s a fair chance that, for awhile at least, we can find some refuge in secession of the states. There is talk of a “soft” secession of de facto defiance, but that simply smooths the way for a hard one, delaying it for a while. I’m currently convinced this is how it will go, and I’m planning accordingly.

Don’t forget the factor of God’s hand bringing natural disasters. A big CME or micro-nova will change everything, along with pole shifts, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc. Our only real interest is the Lord’s glory, so we shouldn’t mind thinking about our demise coming in various ways. It’s just a matter of going Home sooner or later.

==========

Update on prayer requests for the ministry: I’m still looking for a high volume printer, black-n-white only. I’m now also praying for a rowing machine, and maybe even a small watercraft for rowing, since my legs are toast.

Posted in tribulation | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Keep Your Eyes on the Road Home