Kiln of the Soul: A Statement of Faith

Posted on April 4, 2026 by ehurst

We are prepping for tribulation. A couple of weeks ago we looked afresh at the core of the Covenant of Christ — His Law is His love. Doctrine is frankly secondary; theology is merely human speculation. Jesus said that feudal submission to the Father and His love for His family is the substance of all that God really requires of us. Everything else is just the mechanics of how we implement the Covenant.

Having established that foundation, we move onto a brief review of the doctrine we build on that foundation. Kiln of the Soul is the organization, the name we call our community. Radix Fidem is the name for our approach to the task of building a covenant community of faith. Thus, the Radix Fidem Booklet is a separate study. Our community starts with that approach.

We are accountable to the Bible. Particularly, we are accountable to ensure we develop a Hebrew outlook in order to understand the Scriptures. The Bible is a Hebrew book teaching a Hebrew religion and requires a Hebrew worldview. We sometimes refer to the fancy word “epistemology” as an academic term for a set of assumptions about reality; the Hebrew epistemology of Jesus Christ is radically different from that of the West in general, and America in particular.

While we note that a genuine Hebraic epistemology takes a lot of study, we insist it should be so widely taught that believers should take it for granted. It’s the duty of community leadership to translate the obscure biblical studies material into the vernacular of common folks. It should be available to people who don’t have any college. They should be able to figure out what it requires of them in daily life.

That includes the thesis of the Unseen Realm. That thesis was taken for granted by the Hebrew people up through the time of Jesus. It underlies the whole New Testament, as well. We have had some two millennia of Greco-Roman and Germanic converts burying that thesis under their own mythology, which they brought to the Bible. Their pagan epistemology produced a growing distance between themselves and what Jesus actually taught.

Thus, we reject an awful lot of church theology as speculative nonsense arising from a pagan mythology. If we understand the word “mythology” as a major element in epistemology, then we should devote ourselves to the Hebrew “mythology” of Jesus our Lord. That would include the substance of the Unseen Realm teaching — Divine Council, Three Rebellions, Messianic Expectations, etc.

Along with that is the biblical doctrine of Divine Election. Not Calvinism; that’s a load of rationalist speculation about election. We reject a whole bunch of speculative theology and stick with the simple assertions of Scripture about such things. We don’t elaborate; we simply translate the ideas from Hebrew culture into our current cultural orientation. Thus, “getting saved” does not mean getting a ticked to Heaven. That’s already settled by election; no human can alter God’s choices. Salvation is a matter of embracing the Covenant and gaining the full blessings that God promised His children on this earth. We are redeemed from slavery to the Devil and released to the high privilege of walking in the Covenant of Faith in Christ.

That covenant assumes a Hebrew feudal organization and tribal orientation. Every community (AKA “church”) is a tribe of Jesus’ nation. We cannot obey His command to love each other as He loves if we reject the social structure He took for granted in His teachings.

We note in passing that the Hebrew epistemology of Scripture assumes the basic truth behind the Christian Red Pill/Christian Manosphere teaching about human sexuality and romantic relationships. Without male headship in the household, you cannot claim God’s promised blessings. Most western churches have adamantly rejected this message and have compromised with pagan feminism. We will not join them.

We emphasize the mystical approach to faith. This world is not our home and Jesus rejected any ambition to change this fallen world, only some of the people in it. Satan owns all human government to one degree or another. If you live by the flesh and the concerns of this world, you remain under the Devil’s authority. We have been crucified with Christ; we live in this world by His power to discount the importance of fleshly concerns. Human ambitions are death.

A community of faith should naturally be small in number. Decentralization was God’s command very early in human existence. The Bible mandates having a pastor/priestly figure alongside an elder/king figure. That’s God’s Two Witnesses on the earth. A community can have deacons and deaconesses, but everyone is commanded to embrace the shepherd mindset in dealing with each other and the rest of the world.

While any faith community is likely to include those who are non-elect, our mission in this world is to call out to His Elect. We should live in such a way that we signal to the Elect who we are and who they are in Christ. There are some called to go abroad from home and share the gospel, but evangelism is first and foremost simply living by the Covenant wherever you go and whatever you do.

Finally, this is not an official statement, simply a reminder to our community members what sets us apart from all the others. There’s no need for hostility, but some degree of separation from mainstream church folks is simply unavoidable, and separation from the secular world is an utter necessity. We cannot afford to assimilate to the world around us the way most church folks do.

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Not Yet Revealed

Posted on March 30, 2026 by ehurst

During our community online meeting yesterday, we came to the consensus that God has been holding us “in the cleft of the rock” with His hand to protect us from some of the worst effects of the Nephilim rampage here in America. Those of us with the ability to sense the Spirit Realm have been receiving nothing but white noise. It reminds of me of that time in the military when we were learning how radio encryption works. If you tune into to an encrypted channel without a decoder, all you got was static and rhythmic noises. Yet, it serves to confirm that a lot is going on behind the veil. Otherwise, there’s no reason for all the radio traffic.

The old military phrase “need to know” applies here. We don’t need to know a lot of what is happening in the Unseen Realm; there’s nothing we can do about it. What we do need to know is just enough to denounce sin and injustice according to His Word.

Trump is not a cartoon, not a cardboard cut-out. He’s a real person with all the attending complications. He is a pivotal figure in human history with no easy paths to choose. It serves no purpose to characterize him in overly simplistic denunciations, but it’s certainly a lie from Hell to praise him as a Messiah figure. Either path serves only to distract us from our divine mission.

In Iran, there is not a single shred of gain for American involvement. It is not in our national interest. Trump knows this.

We do hear a lot of preachy rhetoric about how this will usher in the Second Coming of Christ, as if that were a summum bonum that waits for some human action. Of course, this goes against everything Scripture says. Nothing about the End of Time rests on human choices; it is wholly rooted in divine choices alone. Divine Election works across the whole fabric of human existence, not just individual redemption. The family of God as a whole is Elect, and so is all that happens to us. Our only part is to cooperate and participate willfully in divine blessings, or to resist and carp about what we want and suffer disappointment.

Up to a point, it’s the same for the non-elect. They can choose to live this life in the shadow of the Covenant, or they can chase the lies of Satan and reap the sorrows of someone who wants all humans destroyed. Does anyone believe that Trump is even a believer? He’s said and done things that indicate he is utterly cynical about moral and spiritual matters. Rather, he is the ultimate Gentile neocon. He goes with the doctrine that it’s good for the masses to believe in what he considers nonsense because that’s how to manipulate the masses in favor of whatever goals he actually pursues.

I’ve said in the past that I believe neocons use Zionists without actually believing any of that nonsense about a loving God and some divine destiny. Zionists are a very religious bunch with concrete political dreams, but neocons are something else entirely. Neocons are officially secular, but they act like The Cult. Zionists keep pointing back to the Bible as the justification for everything they do, cynical or not. If you spent some time reading what has been leaked out of the secret councils of the neocons over the decades, you know that they would throw the modern State of Israel under the bus in heartbeat in favor of a one world government they would run.

Thus, I suggest that Trump is not a Zionist; he only pretends to be. He fits neatly into the mold of neocons who are quite lefty on social policy, but don’t like socialism itself. They prefer capitalist oligarchy. And they rarely open their mouths in public without some massive lies pouring out.

So, it’s not just a matter of what Netanyahu wants from Trump, because the PM of Israel is only a placeholder. He’s a figurehead seeking to preserve his own hide; as long as he’s PM he can’t be prosecuted for crimes he most certainly has committed. So, he’s riding a wave of zeal for capturing the fantasy of a Greater Israel. Netanyahu has zero moral principle; he doesn’t actually care a whit what happens to the Israeli citizens. They are cannon fodder. But in his eyes, all the more so are the Gentiles of this world expendable.

You see, while Netanyahu has no genuine religion at all, he is held by the Satanic conviction that Jews are the only humans on the planet, while Gentiles are just animals meant to serve Jews. It’s a religious doctrine of Judaism, but it goes much deeper than that. If someone fails to be a Jewish supremacist, they aren’t actually a Jew — it’s part of what defines the Jewish identity. So, the PM must perform as if he were utterly sold out to the mission of Zionism and Jewish supremacy, set solidly on a path to rule the Gentile nations of the world. In order for Netanyahu to stay in his safe zone, he has to play along with the Greater Israel dream of Zionists.

For Zionists, the US is the servant horde groomed to carry out their will. Having broken every other country in the Middle East, in one way or another, the only obstacle left is Iran. The Zionists insist that it must be broken like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc. — and now is the time. The only question is how to make it happen.

The “shock and awe” didn’t work as Trump and Netanyahu expected. There was no Plan B, so Trump had to hastily hustle up some troops and move them into place for a ground invasion. It’s the only obvious next step. The problem is that the troops available are nowhere near enough for an actual ground war. There are some kind of stuttering steps here, since it turns out that the Marine Expeditionary Unit brought in from Japan isn’t the whole unit. There’s some leaks indicating that the main body of the force is still back in Japan. And the rapid deployment forces from the 82nd Airborne haven’t actually moved, only the HQ element.

Thus, something is causing Trump to delay implementation. I can only guess at some of the pressures he’s under, but I believe it has to do with his hopes for a lasting legacy in keeping control of the government when his term runs out. In other words, it’s not the Zionists that are really calling the shots; it’s the neocons keeping an eye on their long term plans.

As copiously noted in the alternative media, the American people are not wholly on board with all this Iran stuff. The threat of popular resistance is very high. In order to move forward with a real invasion of Iran, a plurality of voters must support it. And while the stock markets don’t vote, they do sway public opinion a great deal. They aren’t onboard, either.

Again, nobody in Washington DC gives a damn about how this is going to hurt the people — and it most certainly will hurt. It does already, and it will get worse. The issue is that Trump cannot move forward until he ensures his neocon entourage can stay in power. He’s caught between a rock and a hard place. He can’t afford to disappoint the Zionists who don’t give a damn about the future of the US. At the same time, he can’t afford to lose the midterm elections.

It doesn’t help that the US simply does not have the resources to actually invade Iran. We don’t have enough bodies to do the job; it would require a call-up of reserve forces and mobilization of transportation on a scale not seen in decades. Thus, Trump must figure out a partial measure that will actually weaken Iran further without risking a total tactical failure.

This is just the part we can see. At the same time, there is a raft of activity in the Unseen Realm that we simply cannot sense. Something truly awful, some kind of abomination is cooking up there that would shock us all if we knew. This is what our community believes is the thing from which God is protecting His covenant people. We can guess some of it because Scripture offers a lot of prophetic symbolism about that part of the world. Something truly ancient and significant resides in the Persian people of Iran, something that raises the stakes far beyond what is obvious from a human angle. There’s an ongoing tussle in the Spirit Realm that Daniel’s prophecy only hinted at.

This is what’s behind my prediction that, if the US attacks Iran, it would end in a military disaster. I can’t see anything feeding into that result, only the result itself. It’s a mystery as yet not revealed.

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Jesus’ Birthday

Posted on March 28, 2026 by ehurst

Ref: Naked Bible 138: What Day was Jesus Born?

The solution requires you first understand the Three Rebellions: the Fall, the descent of the Watchers, and the elohim betrayal of their commission in the division of nations at Babel. We’ll come back to that.

Heiser worked with an actual astronomer on this to get the exact details nailed down on celestial events and timing (someone who chose to remain anonymous). Most of the material in this podcast shows up in his book, Reversing Hermon, and a little is also in his two fiction books, The Facade and The Portent.

One of the first things he does is debunk the common idea that Josephus knew what he was talking about when he said Herod died in 4 BC. An awful lot of research shows it was more like 1 BC. Granted, the three articles that give us the bulk of the original materials for this date are not publicly available on the Net, but the data is not a joke. Heiser admits it is not widely known.

Then he jumps to Romans 10:5-17. That’s all a setup for verse 18: “Have they not heard?” Logically you would expect Paul to say “no” and that’s why we have missions and evangelism. But Paul says they have heard the gospel, and quotes Psalm 19:4 — the Septuagint version: “Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.” It’s part of that passage that declares the Heavens have been a consistent witness to the revelation of God. Not in a literal voice of words, but it’s inherent in the glory of Creation.

More to the point, it was the celestial bodies in the sky that declared the coming of the Messiah. Certainly not in sufficient detail to tell how to be saved, as Paul outlines there in Romans 10; that’s why Jesus had Apostles to share His teaching. Nor do the Apostles talk about the message in the heavens. It wasn’t that specific. Indeed, in Luke 24 the resurrected Lord stands right there among them and they still didn’t get why He had to die on the Cross.

Rather, the message of the stars was simply that the Messiah was coming, and when He did, the stars told observers that He was born. Note: the statement in Matthew 2 uses a generic term of any celestial body, not just stars. It could have been almost anything that typically shows up in the sky. Heiser suggests it was Jupiter in retrograde motion. The Magi were peculiar in having had generations of study tracking the stars, planets, etc. They knew the math and had a broader context for reading the meaning of such things.

However, the clue is mentioned elsewhere in the NT: Revelation 12:1-6. This is one of those portions of Revelation that does not refer back to the OT, but it appears John spoke to some experts like some Magi or someone who knew the details of what they told Herod and others in Palestine. He included it because it coincides with Jewish Messianic calendar expectations. Further, the date is quite plausible in the wider context of the NT; it matches all the variables.

In John’s passage there he looks up in the night sky, describing what he saw. The woman is the faithful among the nation of Israel (OT “virgin daughter of Zion”), not just Mary alone. Her child is the Messiah who ascends to Heaven (after the resurrection and the 40 days). The woman flees to the wilderness to a place God has prepared, a covenant home for those of true faith.

Most readers would not likely have known much about Mary at that time, but they would recognize the imagery of faithful Israel in things like the dozen stars around her head as Virgin Zion. Gentiles would probably recognize it as Virgo, with a literal twelve stars around her head in the constellation. John is co-opting that pagan image and echoes the astrological jargon of his time as borrowed from the Magi and their astrology. Second Temple Jewish literature would have brought in mention of Joseph and his dreams, along with other references to Abraham and Sarah.

But returning to John’s hijacking the zodiacal signs, for Virgo to have the moon at her feet refers to the passage of the sun and moon through her constellation at the proper season. That’s where the Masoretic text gets the reference to “their line” in Psalm 19, a reference to the alignment of the sun/moon which puts Virgo “in the ecliptic”. The sun was positioned in the constellation as if it were Virgo’s clothing. It’s a 20 degree arc of the sky bracketing when Jesus would have been born.

How likely would the Magi have known the OT? It’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t, as they collected that sort of religious literature from all sources. Jews were scattered all over the Mesopotamian Valley in which the Magi traveled and worked. The Magi already believed in the coming of three Messiahs (Zoroastrianism), so comparing notes with Jews about their Messiah would be a natural point of convergence. See Isaiah 7:14; they would have known about the Messianic prophecy of a virgin giving birth to a Davidic King. Pagan literature referred to Virgo giving birth to divine kings.

Keep in mind: The astronomical math of how the moon acts while the sun is in the constellation of Virgo, we have a period of about an hour and a half for Jesus to be born to satisfy the signs John describes. See Psalm 2:7-9; John’s image is undoubtedly Jesus. John makes it obvious that it only appears that Satan has won the day. In the end, he is defeated by the ascension. There’s no doubt that the sea monster is Satan, the monster of chaos, and sometimes refers to the nations as those who reside under his authority and become agents of his chaos against the people of God.

We cannot rest on Revelation 12 alone. The NT points to other celestial indicators that we must include in our reckoning here. What would the Magi have seen from their homeland? The constellation Leo is directly above Virgo’s head, known as the ancient symbol of Judah (Genesis 49:9-10; Revelations 5:5). It was an important constellation for Jews, obviously. In that constellation is Regulus, known in the ANE as “the King Star”. Just so, as the largest and brightest of the moving stars, Jupiter was the King Planet. It could track into conjunction with Regulus to signal a strong omen.

When you take all the details into account, you come up with only one possible date even close to the time of Jesus: 11 September 3 BC. Heiser goes on to detail how the motion of Jupiter from the viewpoint of Magi would be heading toward Judah. When they get there, Jupiter appears to stop visually because of the complex motion of planets in the Solar System. It then begins to travel backward (retrograde) for a while and rejoins Regulus sometimes. That it halted signaled to the Magi they had arrived in the general location.

Heiser goes on to note that this date was also the Day of Trumpets (Tishri 1) and connects to Noah’s Flood.

John mentioned the Ark of Covenant in Revelation 11 right before his description of the birth in chapter 12, so his imagery of the birth of Christ is a way of declaring that the Divine Presence of the Ark has returned in the form of God’s Son. Jesus was born on the Day of Trumpets, 3 BC, which had become the Jewish New Year by that time. Many kings in the history of Israel regarded that as their coronation day, too. Jewish tradition also regarded it as the day of Creation, and the celebration of Trumpets was partly the renewal of that.

Heiser also tracks it to the sin of the Watchers and the Flood. Keep in mind that the Day of Trumpets (in the fall) was the start of the agricultural calendar, the time of harvest, going back before the Exodus from Egypt. The official ritual calendar in Exodus begins the ritual year with Passover (in the spring). Both calendars were in use at the same time. By placing Adam and Eve in the lush Garden with all the food, it was traditional to think of the Day of Creation as being in the fall harvest. Life begins anew on Trumpets.

Jewish tradition tracked the Day of Trumpets as Noah’s birthday, as well. Noah’s Flood wiped out the Nephilim (at least for a while). This associates Jesus with the redemption that the Flood brought, wiping away the nasty influence that corrupted humanity.

Heiser goes on to associate other obscure Jewish lore with the deep importance of the day and purpose of Jesus’ birth. He was the One who would reverse all the awful things that happened in the Three Rebellions. Paul’s point in Romans 10 was that the people should know; maybe in some unconscious way they do know, since the message has been around since the Fall. Still, we share the gospel and make it all conscious for the Elect.

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Random Computer Notes

Posted on March 26, 2026 by ehurst

1. A couple of years ago I described how I set up my Epson LQ-590ii dot-matrix printer to work under Linux/CUPS. At the end of the post, I lamented how CUPS no longer fed the native Epson printer fonts to apps like word processors. Thus, there was no easy way to access those fonts built into dot-matrix printers.

Recently Joseph Patterson got in touch with me about a project of his for Epson Raster Fonts. He created a small app using Epson’s ESC/P2 language and has been using it for a couple of decades. After chatting with him a bit, he decided to post his project on SourceForge.

The current version is bit limited. It’s aware of only the Roman and Sans fonts. A future version will include all the fonts available on the LQ-590 line (I believe there’s 8). The current package offering is in the DEB format and installs on the system so that you have access to a new command, epcol.

You can peruse the manpage to see what the options are. In essence, it reduces the hassle by introducing a set of macros that pre-process a plain text file for the most popular options. You don’t have to learn the ESC/P2 language, just some handy shortcuts.

Years ago I got into the habit of using CLI editors like Joe and Nano to collect plaintext versions of various online articles that I wanted to archive. Using a defined wrap-column made them very portable. The epcol command will complain if you have text lines too long; it cannot wrap them automatically. Thus, my old habits fit perfectly. So far, I’ve tested it with a wrap column of 74 and things turn out okay.

Thus, if I have a need to print off a copy of something from my archive, it doesn’t require a lot of reformatting. If you have a use for this sort of thing, grab a copy and play with it. Joseph has been quite amendable to comments and questions, so I recommend his project.

2. Someone raised a question that will require some explanation before I can answer.

As readers likely know, I’m not much of a warrior when it comes to the rising idiocy in America. I don’t believe there’s anything we can do to save the country. The one area where I might resemble an activist is in the realm of computers and online communications. While I am still quite dubious of any efforts to sway government policy, I am all for taking whatever actions are necessary to carry out my gospel mission online.

I have a mandate from God. I’m not much interested in any human concerns — human governments, in particular — about that mission. I’ll do whatever it takes to share the message with my audience; I will not be deterred from shepherding my flock. If there is a technological work-around for government interference, I’ll use it if I can.

In other words, while I don’t qualify for the label “hacker” when it comes to resistance, you could refer to me as an info-warrior. I will tolerate surveillance to some degree, but not censorship. Censorship of the gospel is from Hell, and I refuse to cooperate. I’ll fight that.

I treat censorship as terrorism or espionage. Sometimes it may serve well to publicly discuss methods and techniques; sometimes not. Sometimes the mission will surely branch into other forms of resistance when countering terror or espionage, and I’m simply not going to show all my cards. If you need to know, the Lord will make a way to share it privately.

Recent moves by our own American government have threatened to weaken our freedom of expression online. One of Trump’s buddies has proposed to weaken the Section 230 protections for services like WordPress, Substack, etc. The idea is to declare those services “publishers” responsible for the content of everything they host. It would make censorship a lot easier for officials, since the government wouldn’t have to wade through every blog by every individual and go after them. Instead, the government could simply declare certain kinds of writing illegal and make the “publisher” liable for it.

Sooner or later, such restrictions will come. I can’t stop that, but I can find other ways to keep my message alive. You should expect me to use those other methods when necessary. It’s not a question of whether, but when.

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Rough Riders Return

Posted on March 24, 2026 by ehurst

Jesus warned His disciples to keep an eye on political agitation in Jerusalem. Sooner or later, it would provoke Rome to lay siege to the city. He told His followers to get out of town when they see it coming, because it would be the pinnacle of tribulation for all of human history. He also said it would not be a brief time of sorrow, but quite long. He warned that by the time a Roman official dared to enter the Temple building, it was too late.

Our tribulation won’t be that bad, but bad enough. We have a more subtle clue for which to watch: the collapse of the petrodollar system. I’m not suggesting it’s a sure thing, but if it does happen, the storm of chaos will be highly unpleasant.

The petrodollar is how the US government manages to keep borrowing. Everyone must have dollars to buy oil from OPEC, and those dollars are in turn used to purchase US Treasuries. If Iran and their friends can break the petrodollar system, there’s no way the US can keep selling those Treasuries. The government would default on the massive debt.

By the way, if you ignore Social Security, but add in all the unacknowledged real obligations of the US government funding that currently exist, it’s more like $50 trillion.

A default would hand the bankers the leverage they have always wanted. They will force through a CBDC for the entire western world. That would be a risky gambit, but for the US government to continue existing, it would be forced to accept such a deal. That kind of deal would include likely confiscation of all precious metals physically available in the US territory, among other things.

For example, it would likely be tied to a mandatory federal ID for the Internet. The bankers are on record favoring censorship of popular public expressions of opinion. Remember the “debanking” scandal? They would demand an end to any form of privacy, including encryption.

If the US fractures, some of the states will no doubt repudiate the federal debt. However, given what we’ve seen lately, nothing prevents state governments from implementing some of these same horrors on their own, including so-called “Red States”.

I just imagine we are in for a rough ride.

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Tend His Sheep

Posted on March 21, 2026 by ehurst

Collate; pull together your memory of Scripture.

There were Three Rebellions: (1) The Fall in the Garden forced us into mortal bodies and made us focus on a worldly existence; (2) the Watchers crossed the boundary into this world and gave birth to the Nephilim, getting directly involved in mortal existence while remaining themselves immortal; and (3) after the Tower of Babel division of humanity, the Elohim Council corrupted their authority by seducing the human nations into worshiping their elohim guides instead of God. Thus, the Creator built His own nation from Abraham.

All three of these were broken at the Cross. We no longer need to focus on our worldly existence; we died with Him on the Cross. The power of the Watchers and Nephilim have been subjected to Christ our Lord. And God no longer has any use for a political nation on this earth to represent Him. The Kingdom of Christ is a spiritual empire with representatives in the whole realm of Satan. We may be placed under human authority for the time being, but we belong to none of them.

God tore the Temple Veil in two; the entire ritual law and the identity of Israel as a human nation evaporated. Now, everyone who was previously under that ritual identity must come to Christ on the same terms as every Gentile. We all must renounce our fleshly identity and allegiances in favor of feudal submission to Christ as Lord. While our primary duty is striving to live by His Covenant Law in our hearts, we know that our human success is His problem; it’s really not in our hands.

The priorities that guide us, and the actions we take before the eyes of humanity, will appear to them as any number of things. Those who see only with human understanding will have no grasp of what we do. But the Elect will see with spiritual eyes and feel the divine call to higher things.

If you live by fleshly concerns, you will not be able to grasp divine priorities. If you do not nail your fleshly nature to the Cross, it will dominate you, holding open the door for Satan and his allies to come and go in your soul. Genuine spiritual warfare is you fighting your own fleshly nature with three advantages: Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross that makes us acceptable in His Presence, the message of His teachings, and our willingness to suffer in the flesh.

The New Testament teaches us to parse Scripture by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We are warned that such parsing and the resulting application will not always be the same for every earnest follower of Christ. Paul used the example of dietary habits as something best left to the convictions of the individual believer. He said the same about ritual holidays. The final issue is the command of Christ to sacrificially love your spiritual family despite their peculiarities. Our greatest accomplishment is our ability to love each other despite all the fleshly reasons to hate or simply not care at all.

Some of what the Apostles taught was contextual to their times, their situation. Other teachings were more universal. We aren’t expected to agree on where we land on a lot of things. This is not an intellectual exercise; human logic is not competent to assess these questions. They are evaluated in the heart of conviction. You should be looking for a path that allows you to cling to each other, not an excuse to exclude each other.

Jesus said don’t get wrapped up in human governments, the space and time boundaries humans draw in their fleshly pursuits. Paul said that we should try to get along with whatever human government dominates where God sends us, but that in the final analysis, we owe the Lord faithfulness to His Law that we love God as our feudal Master, and that we thus love His family. Our sacrificial love for our fellow believers is all He really requires of us. As far as He is concerned, that fulfills all our obligations to human law.

We are all shepherds of His flock. Fanatical devotion to His family is our only cause. What do your convictions demand on their behalf?

We do not live under the classical Roman Empire. We live under a world where the entire range of human political concerns are in a state of flux. The major governments of this world are fragile, ready to explode or implode at the drop of a hat. It won’t take much to dissolve any of them. It’s very hard to keep track of their policies. It seems laws are formed and then removed by the same whipping tornado of aggregate human passions.

Follow your convictions. That might mean keeping your head down and hoping the storm doesn’t touch you. Some may need to flee an impossible situation, such as Jesus pointed out in Matthew 24:15ff. Some of you will be called to resist in concrete ways, simply because that’s the only way to shepherd those under your covering. I can’t give you a single, unified plan. Live by your convictions.

If the Lord granted you the vision for it, keep track of what you see going on around you in this time of tribulation. If possible, anticipate the very real needs of your flock. Crunch time is here; economic challenges have already been set loose by war over Iran. It may take a while, but the damage has been done and it will echo into our lives all too soon.

One command He gave us: Tend His sheep.

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Quartz Mountain State Park

Posted on March 19, 2026 by ehurst

This is less about the park and more about the terrain. Not all of Oklahoma is flat.

These hills are made entirely of granite, and there are some pockets of quartz scattered around. These first three shots are a view of the Altus-Luggert Lake from the eastern side, outside the park.

I was hoping to create a panorama from these shots but the Hugin program choked on the images. As a side note, so did GIMP. I had to use Image Magic.

One of the main trails climbs up what they call Baldy Peak. There is no trail, per se, but you can pick your way over the granite boulders to the top. I saw some little kids with their parents above me.

I managed to climb a third of the way up before my knee started complaining. This next image is the view just from that much of a climb.

Turning to the south (image below), you can see that I am standing on the western end of the ridgeline of this granite formation. Most of the hills are actually on private property, from what I understand.

Almost behind me was this view farther up Baldy and the attached ridgeline (image below). It made me miss the old days when I could climb this stuff with ease.

The boat ramp area sits astride an isthmus between hills. This is the view across the cove near the ramp, showing that the water level is a bit low (below left).

On the road to the lodge, there is one pullout for this view. The lower water level exposes sandy deposits around the granite humps. (The text here loses synchronization with the images.)

The lodge is really quite nice. Not so nice is that internal politics within the agency keeps killing any contractors’ interest in running the restaurant. Nobody can keep it open with the tight-fisted budget without raising prices so high that no customers will eat there.

This is where the low water level really shows. The performance venue across the cove doesn’t see much use, either.

I found the view along the bridge quite interesting by itself.

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Won’t Admit It

Posted on March 17, 2026 by ehurst

When I was a ministry student at Oklahoma Baptist University, studies in Western Civilization were a very big thing. It was a major course of study that occupied something close to a quarter of our entire undergraduate course load. By the same token, we were all required to take at least one major course that awakened our awareness of what Western Civilization was not.

I suppose the 1970s was a time when academia across the US had a thing for pointing out a vast lore of non-western civilizations and history. This showed up in philosophy classes, which was a significant part of my ministry curriculum. You could say it was an emphasis for missions preparation. One of my professors was deeply into pointing out western biases. At the same time, our Church History classes made us aware of how the growing institutionalization of Christian religion contributed a great deal to the birth of Western Civilization.

We were taught to have serious doubts about what passes for morality in the West.

Apparently that’s not a thing in Christian education any more. If you pick up a copy of older Bible commentaries from the 1960s and 1970s, you’ll probably find a strong background in comparative civilization studies. If you examine more recent materials from the past two decades, it appears this emphasis is gone. It’s not as if the Biblical Studies folks aren’t aware of the differences between ANE and western thinking, but that there seems zero effort to evaluate the West from a biblical philosophical perspective.

They know about it, but it never occurs to them to use it, much less favor it.

I’ve been looking through commentary materials written since about the turn of millennium, and this is what I keep running into. I’m not saying it’s bad scholarship, but that it’s weak. Granted, there is a bit of silly pro-western cheer-leading. I consider that the default for people who don’t know better. The only reason such a thing is possible is due to the lack anything countering it.

I’m sure some of it can be blamed on the invasive feminism that helped to drive me out of the mainstream church life. Genuine Red Pilled masculinity is quite rare in the mainstream. Indeed, churches that seem to embrace the Red Pill are marginalized by the feminist mainstream. Nobody seems to notice that the thesis of the Red Pill outlook is easily the single best explanation for some of what shows up in the Old Testament. The ancient Hebrews were quite Red Pilled.

To be honest, I don’t expect this to change. That is, I am utterly convinced that the mainstream cannot be better informed, reformed, or in any way steered back onto a biblical path. I believe the window for repentance on that has closed, along with a raft of other issues that call for repentance. Instead, I am convinced that it will require an apocalypse of some sort that destroys the current mainstream along with the civilization on which it is founded. They must “hit bottom”, as it were.

A few individuals, many who pass through a personal apocalypse, have hit bottom and are embracing the truth. It seems the Lord always keeps a righteous remnant who do not bow the knee to pagan influences. You couldn’t get anyone in the mainstream to admit that Western Civilization is pagan. Thus, Bible Commentary materials will never give it a thought; they will generally promote the West, even if only passively.

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His One Law

Posted on March 14, 2026 by ehurst

In Acts 1, the resurrected Jesus warned His followers that they were not going to hear from God about specific human political changes, because those issues didn’t matter to His Kingdom. He wanted them to focus on spiritual power for spiritual ends. Indeed, in Matthew 24-25 He had already offered rather obvious generalities they could have figured out for themselves. He said when Rome mobilized against Jerusalem, it was time to get out of town. There was nothing useful they could do by hanging around. Nothing in His Kingdom had any concern over controlling political outcomes. All they needed to focus on was His teaching about the Father’s priorities for souls.

What we are allowed to know about God’s eternal agenda includes His determination to have a family household that includes some of us humans. It will happen. He had already gone to the trouble of establishing a garden in which they could live. Upon making humans to populate the garden and to carry out the commission of conforming the garden to His divine character, it provoked an uproar from some of His staff.

One of those staff members went so far as to invoke a fury aimed at destroying the humans outright. For this act of rebellion, God prepared a prison attached to the garden, compelling an eternal being to live within space/time constraints. The prisoner raised objections that echoed with some other staff members, and a debate ensued. God allowed a sort of gentleman’s dispute to follow.

Nothing about any of this caught God off guard. We can only estimate how much the players deviated from the rules. The first of the Three Rebellions, the Fall in the Garden, was likely part of the bet between God and the Devil. The second was a dirty trick, in which some elohim descended to the space/time bubble and got directly involved in corrupting the humans so that their sins would make them ineligible to live. Thus, we got the Flood of Noah. This was an egregious violation, so the slimy traitors were compelled to stay in the prison with the Devil, becoming the Watchers. Their progeny were compelled to stay with them, and eventually were not allowed to have their own bodies.

The third trick was a little more subtle, in which the elohim council members sympathetic to the Devil’s case took advantage of the delegation of the nations to their care at the Tower of Babel. They began presenting themselves to the humans as gods and misled them against God’s rules for the game. God went on to create His own nation against all the others, knowing this nation would eventually become too corrupt for Him to stay directly involved.

But during that nation’s existence, we could say God had a distinct interest in human politics. God had an agenda of eventually playing His trump card of bringing forth His Word as the Messiah. If the staff were going to break the rules, He would simply reserve a secret element in His plan for the Messiah. The kingdom of the Messiah was spiritual, not a human political entity. The citizens of this kingdom had all been chosen before the game began. They were eternal creatures already.

After that kingdom was established, God withdrew from human politics. There was no further need to mess with it. The nature of this divine debate changed completely. From that time forward, the Devil and his friends could do as they liked, within certain boundaries that God enforced on them directly. Whatever they came up with, it had no bearing on the final outcome. That doesn’t keep them from trying to turn the entire human race against God, but it simply doesn’t matter because of the Elect salted throughout the human race who would eventually all change sides.

The only question now is revealing who the Elect are, because they will replace the rebels on God’s staff. The whole focus of the Devil and his allies is keeping the Elect from their divine heritage promised in the Covenant. The mass of humans he could destroy by his deceptions, but the Elect would never be his, except in the very limited sense of keeping them enslaved to their fleshly natures while they lived on earth.

Thus, we see in the Old Testament history how God intervened directly in political affairs because it was necessary to bring forth His Son. He made sure to reveal His intentions to the nation He shepherded and guided their choices. After the Son, most of that went away. He has surely revealed some political events to His Elect from time to time, but we have come to a stage in the game when it simply doesn’t matter what humans do under the guidance of Darkness.

Granted, you can sometimes make educated guesses about human politics. I consider this estimate reasonable. The only reason we have any use for such analysis is to better inform our mission work. It shouldn’t affect primary decisions; those should be steered by conviction. Rather, we would use such analysis to maintain an awareness of conditions we must face.

For example, we can be sure of economic stress. We knew that was coming because our convictions warned us, but we could have guessed a year ago neither the specific timing nor specific means by which such stress would come. Now we can see the concrete reality that our convictions warned us about.

Nothing that is coming at us is germane to the mission. That’s why God isn’t releasing more prophecies about any of it. The mission remains the same: We must restore the habit of conscious covenant community building. We must learn to focus on the ultimate threat to the Devil’s agenda, that we love each other sacrificially. We must become good at it, well versed in all the difficulties we must vanquish in our own souls. Monster churches with all their organizational grandeur is a fleshly work that distracts from the real mission.

The obsession with orthodoxy is easily the single greatest barrier we face among believers today. We are confronted with a fixation on organizational unity as the false idol erected to keep us from even seeing spiritual and moral unity. We do not need to agree on theology; we need to love each other. We don’t need organizational unity at all. We need a culture of highly decentralized small communities of faith that are flexible on theology.

Our sole identity in Christ is how we learn to care for each other. That’s His One Law as King.

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Dumbfounded How Bad It Is

Posted on March 10, 2026 by ehurst

Re: Is America Winning or Losing the War with Iran?

Leave it to Ron Unz to defy censorship with such flair.

We are not there to see it. The people there are generally not allowed to talk about it. Still, there has never been a time when leaks have been so generously given as right now. I’ll grant you that I’m not in a position to verify much of anything, except in broad general principles of what I saw during my time in uniform.

Never put it past the upper staff to lie. Moreover, never put it past them to lie beyond your imagination — egregiously and even hatefully. I saw it myself. When you factor in the ego of Trump and the utter moral filth of Netanyahu, it goes beyond calling it “lying”.

If any portion of Theodore Postol’s reporting is true, it’s far worse than I would have ever thought. I knew the US forces were not prepared for this crazy mission. I’m dumbfounded at how bad this is going.

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