New Testament Doctrine: Mark 2:13-22

Posted on August 28, 2021 by ehurst

Jesus addresses a major issue in New Testament Doctrine. It signifies yet another critical departure from Judaism.

Levi Matthew is, according to a rather strong Early Church tradition, a cousin of Jesus because their mothers were sisters. That makes James the Less (either “smaller” or “younger”) a brother of Matthew and another cousin of Jesus. By this tradition, Alphaeus is also called Clopas (or Cleopas). Nobody today is in a position to verify or deny this tradition.

Matthew collected taxes for Herod Antipas, stationed in one of the cities along the shore of Galilee. We have no idea where folks get the idea he collected taxes for Rome. Augustus had done away with tax-farming (publicani was the Latin term for tax farmers) about the time Jesus was born. It took a long time coming back into play, at which point we know the Roman administrators didn’t trust Jews to tax their own on behalf of the Empire.

Besides, Roman taxes didn’t amount to much at that point; it was all the customs and business taxes levied by the “native” rulers that fell so heavy on the people. The reason Pharisees despised tax-gatherers so much was because it made it difficult for religious leaders to collect various religious taxes, since the government taxes had left everyone too poor to pay. Free-will offerings were nowhere near enough to fund the lavish Temple services and all the priests and Levites on duty. Synagogues were also donation starved, and most peasants never attended in the first place.

So our text tells us that Jesus had another teaching session somewhere on the shore of Galilee. After that, He went to the tax office and found His cousin Levi Matthew. Mark makes it sound like Matthew surely heard some of this teaching and was moved. He knew this rabbi as his cousin, so it wasn’t hard for Jesus to convince him to join the merry band of disciples.

This meant Matthew had a career change, and he hosted a farewell party before going on the road. Naturally, he invited his friends who were also tax collectors. Keep in mind that, by ancient Hebrew tradition, eating at the same table was a declaration of peace with whomever shared the meal. The Pharisees had made it official doctrine that these tax collectors were “sinners” and covenant outcasts. It was tantamount to eating with Gentiles, in their eyes. So they questioned why Jesus, in His rabbi regalia, was eating with these people. Matthew’s friends were big fans of Jesus and His unique sense of authority in teaching the Covenant, instead of the Talmudic traditions.

The Pharisees had addressed themselves to the disciples, and Jesus overheard it. He rose to answer Himself. Using a parable about how those who were ill knowing they needed a physician, He pointed out how this crowd was eager to repent at His teaching. The Pharisees had convinced themselves long ago that they needed no repentance, as John the Baptist had noted. This betrays the whole point of the sacrificial system, founded on the understanding that everyone is fallen, and in need of a constant reminder that sin costs blood. At the core of the Covenant, everyone must live in a constant state of penitence.

Matthew, Mark and Luke together say that it was during this same event that the Pharisees raised another issue. Most likely this feast fell on one of those fast days spuriously declared by the Pharisees twice every week. Given that John the Baptist and his disciples kept this tradition, why did Jesus and His disciples break with it?

Jesus answered by acting as if this feast was a wedding feast. That would have made it exempt from the Pharisees’ fasting schedule. It was common for rulers in the Ancient Near East, and a Messiah in particular, to treat the people as his collective bride upon enactment, and every renewal, of treaties and covenants. Jesus was the Messiah, and He was renewing the Covenant of Moses with the Hebrew nation. He was restoring people who had been unjustly ostracized. At some point, He would have to return to His eternal throne, and would no longer be with them in person. Thus, there’s no reason to force them all to fast, when they should feast and celebrate every moment they had with Him.

When the time comes, fasting will be restored with a new purpose that had nothing to do with Pharisaical legalism.

Then He pulls out two closely related parables, one about cloth and the other about wine. You do not sew unwashed patches onto old garments, lest it shrink the first time it gets wet and tear an even bigger hole in the old garment. You do not take the first flush of juice from the wine vat, with all that extra sugar content, and pour it into old wineskins, lest the fermenting wine swell and burst the skins that have already been stretched to the limit.

Jesus was coming to renew the Covenant of Moses. This was no simple patch job. It was going to be updated to the Covenant of the Messiah. What served so well for some 1400 years was going to be translated into a new context. Doing so meant the older version would be closed out. All the more so since it had been neglected by the Jewish leaders. It had gotten pretty crusty and was no longer capable of expressing the eternal will of the Father in the current situation. The Messiah was the personified will of the Father, and would be coming to live in His people’s hearts. He is the New Covenant. It was the same wine from the same vineyard, but a new vintage that needed new forms that could stretch to fit.

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We Are the Packaging

Posted on August 27, 2021 by ehurst

I can’t tell you this is a prophetic word, but let me urge you to consider this: Our covenant community must close the door on Internet outreach.

It’s not that people won’t be moved through the virtual medium, but that’s not the emphasis. Here’s the thing: God will certainly grant us a limited safe passage on the Internet. I still believe that the dark clouds will smother the majority of our public expressions of faith on the Net, but the Lord will leave us enough room to conduct His business on the fringe of things. And that’s where we will be — on the fringe.

The wokies are simply the latest manifestation of totalitarian spirit. They already own the bulk of the Internet that people see and with which most people interact, and will continue to cement their control. For the time being, it’s noteworthy that this wokie agenda includes a very pro-vax threat to the rest of us. It’s a primary issue right now because the MSM are keeping it in the front. However, the wider wokie agenda continues moving unabated in the background.

And most of their work will be felt on the Internet. That remains the primary battlefield; this is fundamentally an information war. They don’t own the wires. They will strive to take control of them, but I don’t think that will turn out too well for them. Still, they already own the primary manifestations of the Internet as the population experiences it. The trick for us is not to engage directly those manifestations any more than is necessary for the mission. We must find a place on the fringes of the Net.

Meanwhile, the bulk of what we do should take advantage of how humans naturally communicate without the Net. You see, God is going to preserve that face-to-face “network” for His own use. It will last through the coming CME, and will certainly remain after the micro-nova destroys most of civilization. What I’m trying to do here is plant the seed for believers to realize that the Net is just a tool, not the real world. Much as the elite want to make the Net our world, it won’t happen. Thus, it’s our divine duty to make sure we keep alive the business of touching others offline. We need to be a people of the human touch.

It’s not just the words we use. That’s actually a very small part. The witness of truth has always been the physical manifestation of faith. It’s always been a matter of face-to-face contact, and it will always be that way.

My effort to put things on paper is just a small manifestation of that. When the online world becomes the primary means of oppression and persecution, our insistence on investing ourselves into the offline world will be the primary advantage. I’m praying that people catch this vision.

So I’ve been praying and contemplating these things, and I know that, for me at least, the Lord has granted some clarity, even some changes in the details. For example, instead of dumping my desktop machine, it will eventually become the “home cloud” — a storage server. Having books on paper is a good thing, but this is a small apartment where I live. Some of the stuff I need will have to remain virtual, but I’ll need my own copy here where I don’t have to trust the wider Internet.

My writing needs to be on paper, but given the current state of things, I can’t gain access to a full print shop in the flesh. I trained at one time on how to run all the equipment (offset press, print camera, plate burner, etc.), but I’ve not seen that older machinery in decades. And unless someone wants to fund a shop and all that equipment, in good working order, things can’t happen that way. Without that kind of print shop, almost all of the machinery someone else has relies on some kind of computerized file source. I’ll have to keep a copy of everything in printable format, meaning on a computer with all the instructions for a printer to pump out the desirable end product on paper.

And what I, or anyone else, can write is not the end of the matter. You see, there is virtually no way we can reduce to teaching the actual doing of our gospel witness. Biblical Law is a living and active thing in the human soul, and each of us must grow our own witness. All the books in the world can’t answer the essential questions about that. You just have to get on with the mission. Screwing things up is built into it, because it’s how we recover from mistakes that speaks so very loudly.

It’s not taught, but caught. You have to see it and experience it yourself. That’s how Our Lord works.

So, we won’t be cut off from the Net so much as we must consciously back away in order to have more energy and resources for the real-world effort. I’ll even go so far as to say this is a word from the Lord: Prepare to witness offline, even as the society around us gets more online. A critical element in how God moves is through that real-world interaction. If people can’t come to Him that way, they can’t come at all, because that’s how God does things. Once more: The packaging is part of the message.

You and I are the chosen packaging.

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Nobody Looking Out for Us

Posted on August 26, 2021 by ehurst

This regards the scientific facts and likely legal repercussions from the FDA rushing through it’s approval of Pfizer COVID vaccine.

I didn’t expect what I found today. I’m going to link to a presentation that has no fluff, and may indeed be a little too dense with facts for some. I know nothing about the host. So far, the site gives me a bad impression because some of what is presented there is clickbait. However, this particular piece is well done: Checkmate. Game Over. We WIN. On this page, the documents referred to are linked for your review.

There’s nothing new about the accusations of fraud and criminal avoidance of applicable regulations. The problem is that I have serious doubts that any lawsuits filed will get anywhere. We saw the careful planning that went into the election fraud, and how the recriminations are going nowhere in the courts. We may eventually see one judge issue a ruling that won’t change anything regarding the election.

That’s what I expect from any actions filed in courts from the fallout of this vaccine approval. Yes, it broke all kinds of rules and people can be sued or indicted. But I sincerely doubt the federal government will allow that to happen. I would expect that the courts will be instructed to handle this in such a way as to make it all quite pointless, same as with the election lawsuits.

The fix is in.

I’m convinced the whole point is to provoke a violent uprising. It might not be the plans of Biden and his friends, but someone behind the scenes knows this is how it will go, and they plan to profit from it in some way. The manipulation and exploitation will continue after any break-up in the Union of States. Don’t look for any genuine relief to come from that.

I keep saying: We have no dog in this fight. I stand by that. It may well be necessary to get involved in a certain sense of swimming with the tide, but not in the sense of actually believing any intentional good will come to the gospel message we bear. God will grant us whatever He wants us to have for the mission, but there’s nobody on this earth looking out for us.

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Speculation for Late August 2021

Posted on August 25, 2021 by ehurst

Someone asked me to speculate on some things I’ve mentioned in the past. There’s no reason to think my knowledge and wisdom is somehow superior to that of others, but I don’t mind revealing what I expect to face in the coming years. That way, you’ll know what to expect from me.

So, I’ve discussed the micro-nova predicted by Suspicious Observers led by Ben Davidson. I’ve also mentioned a prophetic warning that we are due for a nasty CME. I don’t believe these are the same event. What I expect is a fairly big CME during this solar cycle. We have just passed the most recent nadir in 2020, and the peak is due in 2025. Since we have no hints from God yet, we are left with guessing that it will come somewhere near the solar peak. I’m guessing the micro-nova is farther out, and not connected to this solar cycle.

But I remain convinced that God will tell me and a lot of other folks right before it happens, if we are paying attention. God has never failed to warn me of such major changes in my life, but I haven’t always been smart enough to know what it meant. Right now, I’m praying that I’ll recognize it for what it is.

You might say that God will slap us with a glancing blow in the near term, a warning to get our houses in order. Of course, “getting the house in order” means embracing a far more mystical faith, in which we stop worrying so much about civilization and human aspirations. It will train us to be ready for the main event coming later. Most of the world is unlikely to listen to that initial warning, and within another decade or two following that, civilization will be wiped away by the micro-nova. There’s every reason to think it won’t be an extinction event, but it will make a pretty big mess. There will be lots of earthquakes, volcanic activity, and the magnetic pole movement will trigger things we just cannot imagine.

There’s a high probability I won’t live to see the latter event. However, I’m planning to witness the CME. My sense is that it will not destroy the entire US power grid. I have no feeling at all for other countries, but with the US, I figure it will explode a lot of transformers. Places in the US with frequent power outages will suffer worse in a CME for the obvious reason that their grid is already fragile. I suppose we can pray that it comes in winter when the cold air will save more transformers from overheating.

During the resulting outage, lots of computer devices will become useless, simply because the power will be out for cell towers, various kinds of Internet service providers, etc. It will be out for government offices, commercial businesses, retail stores, etc. It might be handy to have solar power generators for small stuff. Some places will fare better than others. Keep in mind that the kind of manufacturing that built our electrical grid is not there any more. Some of the maintenance stuff is still done here, but a lot of our manufacturing was sent overseas, so we won’t snap back very quickly if this CME is very powerful at all.

Meanwhile, I’m still expecting Microsoft to do something stupid that may well kill at least part of their business. I tend to believe it will affect Windows more than Office, generally speaking. There could be any number of ways this can happen, but a strong candidate is the political pressure of the wokies in many technology companies, as the bulk of employees tend to be leftist.

Right this moment, we are seeing a test case with Google in court over possible labor violations. The crux of Google’s argument is that the activists were fired, not for activism, but because they tried to force Google management to drop certain customers. Nothing in the case history of NLRB allows union employees to decide who the customers will be. The activists accessed secret data they weren’t cleared to see, and used it to pressure Google to stop serving certain big government agencies. My point in mentioning this is not whether Google might win, since I don’t think the wokies will stop if they lose this case. What I’m pointing out is how the wokies at Microsoft could put pressure on the company to start denying service to people who use the software in ways that make the wokies feel triggered.

But that’s just one very strong possibility; there are other ways Microsoft can cut its own throat. At any rate, I can get the work on my books done almost as easily on a Linux computer, so it’s not as if running Windows on my desktop is anything more than convenient. I feel confident that I’ll be able to finish the book revision project and get some copies in print. I’ll try to buy up enough of my own copies to give away some; Jay and I aim to price them at the cost of printing.

If you try to donate money now, I’ll save it toward a Chromebook. I’d like to not need this desktop system, and I already know from playing with Chromebooks that I can run MS Office and do on one whatever else a computer does for me. I’d prefer to get one in the middle price range for them (≅$400), but this is not a fund-raiser. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen with donations and savings.

And I could be all wrong, so don’t take my word for it. Check your own convictions.

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We Have No Friends

Posted on August 25, 2021 by ehurst

This is a matter of my convictions.

The world is filled with conflict. Do you recognize the battle lines? They’ve shifted recently. The threat of making vaccines mandatory has created a whole new political war. It looks like Trump just jumped the shark. By backing the vaccines, he’s alienated the majority of his most rabid supporters. And this same war has become the single biggest issue for online censorship.

Other political battles are vying for attention. We should have never been in Afghanistan; it was all about resources, not the needs of the people living there. Were you aware that analysis indicates Afghanistan may be one of the single biggest sources of lithium? That’s what electric car batteries are made of, and it’s what burns so hot, resisting all attempts to extinguish when those cars catch on fire. Yeah, we need more rolling fire bombs electric cars on the road.

Were you aware that the necons haven’t disappeared? They just aren’t making as much noise as before. They are letting the Zionists do all the busy work. Leo Strauss was the founder of the neocons and he said the single greatest issue in their identity was keeping Israel as a dispersed nation, always infiltrating and never assimilating into the nations of the world. He didn’t support the Zionist project. It was all about the victimology leverage. If anyone was the soul of The Cult, Leo Strauss was it. His disciples are still among us in very large numbers. They are going to let the Zionists flame out and use the coming destruction of Modern Israel as yet another cynical ploy to make themselves the premier victims of the world. It will be the new Holocaust.

Meanwhile, the neocons are also letting the secular globalists do a lot of their work, as well. Surely you didn’t think that the World Economic Forum (WEF) and similar elitist groups were actually following their own plans? The people at the apex of all these various Tower of Babel cults are all neocons, though often disguised as something else. Even the “neocon” label is just a mask, but it’s probably the most accurate we have right now. At the same time, the globalists like to imagine that they are playing the neocons off against some other enemies.

And all of them are fielding faux grass roots resistance to one thing or another. Do you know that the major leadership of the antivaxxers are not what they claim to be? This thing is being hijacked as we watch. It’s not that there isn’t a genuine resistance in the population, but that the elitists are working overtime to suck them into something that will make a few people an awful lot of money regardless of the outcome. There are precious few leaders out there willing to sacrifice to resist the evils of Critical Race Theory (CRT), the vaccines and lockdowns, the Green Agenda, etc. They are there, but you won’t hear much about them.

Even churches are getting into the act. When you take the time to consider the official statements of various religious agencies, you’ll discover that many of them are painting Bible verses on top of some distinctly secular political agenda. It’s very hard to find one that hasn’t been hijacked.

Do they speak for you? None of those people speak for me. None of them represents the gospel I’ve been given. Some of them might make a little room for me to ride on the running board of the wagon now and then, but none of them really want to help keep the focus on the gospel. They keep insisting that whatever it is they are doing is the gospel.

We have no dog in any of these fights. Our interests overlap here and there, but nobody is our ally. It’s pretty easy to set them off when we press for something they aren’t already doing. The gospel message has been partitioned off and scattered among a dozen opposing camps. Nobody on this earth represents our interests. So we have to kind of pick and choose the things we use to get anywhere.

Personally, I would really love to get behind the anti-censorship movement online, but I’m pretty sure there’s not much hope in that. There are bits of light peeking through here and there, and things could turn around a bit any day now. But for now, it looks pretty dark. Still, don’t be surprised if I signal any kind of change, because it’s a fluid situation.

You see, it’s only a tool for the gospel. It’s not the thing itself. God isn’t necessarily pushing for any particular outcome in all of these battles, and that includes the online war over censorship. We could pray this through and He might be willing to restore some opportunities for online publication of the gospel message, but it’s not essential to His plans. It’s just something comfortable for me and some other folks. At least, that’s how my convictions run on the issue. So I’m being careful, pulling back my investments of time and resources from something I tend to believe will eventually collapse for me. Barring a word from the Lord, my plans are to de-emphasize the use of the Net.

But keep in mind that not everything you can see coming is locked into place. We have to take the time to contemplate and pray, to sense as best we can in our convictions what we can expect from God’s hand in this time of tribulation. Keep in mind that God’s priorities are exceedingly difficult to assess, but we do have some advantage in seeing what they are not. It’s not about the vaccines, despite what an awful threat that is. It’s not about the Green idolatry, which masks some very important stewardship issues. It’s not about the political entity called “Israel.” It’s not about globalists, though God does have some special ire for them.

It’s all about the gospel, which includes a lot more packaging than most folks are willing to understand. It’s how Christians have discarded the included packaging over the past two millennia that has made it so hard for us now. All that other stuff is a stack of nonsense used by Satan to distract people from the real issue. That’s why I say that the situation is rather variable from day to day on many things, because none of them are germane to God’s stated concerns.

Don’t assume that the Internet is somehow inherently evil, nor particularly beneficial. It’s just a tool. The same goes with all the computer technology that goes with it. We could say that about typewriters, paper, pencils and pens. The vaccines and lockdowns are just tools for oppression in general, a distraction from what really matters. The same with Zionism, the neocon doctrine, globalism, etc. None of that really matters. This life is supposed to be absurd.

But be warned that we have no friends out there, except the few people already pursuing the same thing. I haven’t met very many, but I’m convinced they are out there, quietly doing the work of God. He’s going to show us some of them. And others are simply waiting for the signal to rise to this high calling. Never mind how dark it is out there, we must let our light shine. Even if it’s only a tiny handful, somebody out there needs to see it.

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Wisdom Literature Revision Ready for Printing

Posted on August 24, 2021 by ehurst

AT-Wisdom is the next in the series revised for printing. As always, this is in the current MS Office document (DOCX) format; other file formats are available upon request.

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Erect the Mental Barriers

Posted on August 23, 2021 by ehurst

“Watch me, Mommy. Watch me!”

This is a meta-post. It’s about the process of sharing information and inspiration.

Sometimes I want to share a word from the Lord. In keeping with the wisdom of Solomon, I try to be terse about that, because it’s not me you need to know, but the Lord. If you then want to get to know me, there is time for that later.

And those times do come, where I divulge as much of me as this medium permits. I’m trying to make it a habit to give you a clue at the top of the post so you’ll know where we are going, and you can skip the posts that don’t meet your needs in the Lord. Pray for me when I fall below that standard.

If I start sharing about how I’m convinced that this whole COVID-19 policy mess is nothing more than a thinly disguised plan to depopulate the Western world, there is nothing I can do to convince folks of that unless they already have a strong measure of cynicism in the first place. Thus, that’s not a topic for discussion, but an underlying assumption to admit as I go on to discuss something else.

The real topic, then, would be how the system is going to become insidiously hostile to those of us who refuse to play along with the edicts coming out of government. Yes, you have some hope, in that some state and local officials are actually doing their jobs and pushing back against bogus federal mandates. But that doesn’t change the underlying threat, in that the system itself is your enemy.

It used to be that we could count on a certain amount of bureaucratic resistance, alongside the wide presence of individual mercy residing in human souls. That’s being squelched very quickly. The oppressors have mobilized the troops, so to speak, and there’s no allowance for individual variations. I characterize it like that so you’ll give it the emphasis it deserves.

And it’s not as if you don’t see this yourself. Rather, I am seeking to confirm what you know, to give it a stronger shape in your mind. More importantly, it’s to help you think about how we should pray. Most of you are already primed for the passive resistance that stands so strong as the preferred path in the New Testament. The really sad part is that a number of us will end up having to fight something that we dare not let pass, because the threat is to all the people we strive to protect under our spiritual covering. You simply must stand for your convictions.

I’m sure you get that, but here’s the point of this post: We need to be very discerning about whom we grant our attention when it comes to information and advice about the broader context. There is a major cultural problem here, and I know some of you haven’t been able to put your finger on it. There are way too many people out there only pretending to be helpful, when their true goal is to get your attention, without giving any back to you.

I can’t write this off as merely a standard flaw of the fallen fleshly nature. This is something our culture promotes, something we need to fight. You’ll see people putting out these long videos, claiming to have exclusive information that will help you, but only at the cost of giving them your attention as they blather needlessly, and quite unprofessionally, for an hour to put out five minutes worth of information. If you try to contact them for more details about this or that aspect, they won’t respond to you individually. You might get a quick blurb, but there won’t be any real response. At most, they’ll just use it as an excuse for another long video.

I’m not complaining about advertising, where the host(s) of the video mention something they want to sell. I accept that as part of the transaction for the time being.

The flaw is that they have zero interest in you. All they want is to bathe in the spotlight. These aren’t your friends. They are intentionally avoiding the situation where they would have to reciprocate socially in a healthy conversation. Granted, they aren’t the only people making videos, but it’s not hard to figure out who these people are. They pretend this is a formal setting where we’ve all agreed to some rules so they can do their thing and not get eaten alive by the masses. That has its place, but it also comes along with it the moral obligation that they not waste your time. It’s not about them, but the information.

So a good example is Ben Davidson at Suspicious Observers. His daily videos are short and sweet, and if you want more, he has lots of links below the video. It seems clear that he shares what he honestly believes. Only reluctantly does he try to put himself into it. Alex Jones is the opposite. He uses information to get attention, and puts out these long, droning videos where it’s all about him. Worse, he lies knowingly about some things.

So be discerning about this when someone recommends a video. Don’t jump on the bandwagon, where someone urges you to waste time, as if it was some sacred duty to bow before the altar of some “wonderful” speaker. If you think there’s no other way to get the information you seek about something, then do us all a favor and summarize what you got from it. That’s something I’ve tried to do in the past; you don’t need to wade through everything I do. I’m a specialist in certain things that God called me to explore. I try to extract the pertinent information to save you the trouble.

May the Lord guard your hearts and minds.

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Related Questions on the Covenant

Posted on August 22, 2021 by ehurst

We are no longer an earthly nation; we are a nation of hearts. We no longer have a Temple and accompanying rituals; we are the Temple.

When Paul encouraged people to be diligent in studying the Old Testament (their Bible at that time), “rightly dividing the Word,” he meant for them to seek out the new boundaries that come with recognizing how some of the Ritual Law no longer applies. Think about all the provisions in the Law regarding ritual purity; discern how many of them require drawing new boundaries.

There is no covenant nation on this earth today; the Temple veil was torn open. There never will be another covenant nation. There will never be a literal Temple with a Levitical priesthood serving. Most of the old restrictions don’t matter. Remember the fracas between Paul and Peter about whether to eat with Gentiles? Eating at the same table with Gentiles was a matter of declaring peace, when the national identity under the Covenant forbade that. If Israel did not dominate by enforcing the Code of Noah on a Gentile tribe, then there could be no covenant peace.

The Gibeonites and Jebusites were allowed to stay in the Promised Land under the Covenant of Noah. But a Gentile observant of Noah was always allowed to share the table with Israelis, with the exception of Passover. The Pharisees had made a doctrine of spiteful racism against Gentiles, and hid the truth about Noah. Peter should have recognized that Christian Gentiles are inherently covered under the Covenant of Noah, which is what Acts 15 was all about. Scrupulous Jewish Christians needed to recognize that the Law of Moses was not the same as the Talmud, so that false Pharisaical customs were wrong. Those rules didn’t apply in the first place.

The business of dining together no longer represents peace between nations, particularly because there are no valid national covenants. It’s not a Covenant ritual any more. You can eat with the grossest sinners. The reason Jesus ate with tax collectors was a declaration that they were unjustly excluded from Covenant privileges by the Jewish leadership. Those people could have covenant peace with God, and that’s what Jesus was doing at their feasts. That’s a different message. It’s for a different reason that you and I cannot socially distance ourselves from sinners. For us today, it’s because of the limits of physical dominion.

Your dominion under the Covenant of Christ is highly variable with the context, and it’s your duty to recognize it. If you can take dominion in your home over the rest of your family, then the family table becomes a covenant table. At that point, you could discriminate against non-covenant folks, provided you enforce the provisions justly. You may still have convictions that welcome outsiders, but the option is there under those very restricted boundaries.

This is why I keep saying that we cannot ape the Covenant life of the Hebrew people, particularly in the ritual details. There’s a tremendous confusion about that, mostly because churchians tend to believe the lies told by Pharisees, claiming to give us the “real” Law of Moses. All it takes is comparing their lies with the Gospels, and it become readily apparent what God said.

Kosher becomes a mere matter of health ideas, as does questions like circumcision. Follow your convictions; let others follow theirs. When Phinehas skewered the straying Israeli in his tent with the Midianite prostitute, he didn’t need to quote from Moses to know this was what God demanded. Phinehas had God in his heart and knew what his Lord required of him personally. You are supposed to read about the Law Covenants so you can know the heart of the Father.

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Do You Understand His Word?

Posted on August 22, 2021 by ehurst

I’ve read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series of novels. I believe Asimov has captured something of the essential nature of human striving. Now, Apple wants to produce a film version of his series (trailer here). The characters in these stories really do believe it is necessary to preserve human existence, and are utterly convinced they have the right path.

They are wrong.

Against this urgent call for the preservation of what they regard as the essence of civilization, I make the same call as the prophets of old: It’s all vanity. The only hope is to abandon what mankind imagines is greatness and seek the Lord.

Civilization will be forgotten when Christ returns. Nothing mankind strives to do now will be remembered. Do you grasp that? All the good things God has ever promised are entirely possible without civilization. Everything humanity has done to advance will not change anything that matters; we remain fallen humans who tend to reject God and His Word. We remain on the path to Hell. Learn to think of the likes of such grand visions as the Foundation Series as a lie from Satan. All of it is vanity; Solomon had that right.

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:
Fear God and keep His commandments,
For this is man’s all.
For God will bring every work into judgment,
Including every secret thing,
Whether good or evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14)

The Lord is not building civilization. He builds only the family, the covenant community of faith. It ends there. If we gain that by His power, we have obeyed, and our place in Eternity is secure. Nothing else matters.

Everything around us will end terribly. We remain faithful to our commitments made in the name of the Lord, even as we see the whole thing dissolving into dust. How easy it is to forget that this is the Word of God, that this cynicism is exactly what God wants for you. Sure, we play along with human aspirations, but only so that we may manifest His eternal truth against the backdrop of human futility. We do it because that’s what it means to reverence the Lord and keep His commandments.

Until you can invest your whole heart into the Spirit Realm, and learn to care nothing at all for human aspirations, you do not know God and His Word.

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New Testament Doctrine — Luke 5:1-26

Posted on August 21, 2021 by ehurst

The so-called Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) offer slightly varying reports about the sequence of events that took place once Jesus returned to Capernaum. Matthew in particular tends to follow themes, not precise chronology. For now, we will use Luke’s account, simply because it offers more details of the calling of the disciples into full-time ministry.

At the start of His preaching tour of Galilee, Jesus stopped by where four of His disciples were engaged in their normal vocation: fishing at the north end of the Sea of Galilee. The same crowd that had asked Him to stay in Capernaum were going to receive one last session with Him. He had Simon push back one of their boats so He could speak from the pulpit (the actual name for the seat in the prow of the boat).

We note from the context that it seems Simon was the senior partner. And while Andrew isn’t mentioned, he must have been there. James and John, Sons of Zebedee, are mentioned.

Peter and his crew had been fishing all night, which was about the only time fish were up near the surface enough to get caught in a net. Once daylight dawned, the fish typically headed down into the deeps, which also meant swimming far out from the shore. After His message, Jesus turned to Peter who had sat patiently manning the oars to push the boat just out from the shore, and keep it in place while Jesus spoke to the crowd. He suggested that Peter and his crew push out and drop the nets.

Peter objected for the most sensible common grounds that fish weren’t caught in daylight at this time of year. However, he summoned the rest who had been cleaning the nets and they hauled them back into the boat. Peter knew he needed to humor his Master, because that was simply part of being a disciple, even if the Master apparently knew nothing about fishing.

So both boats pushed out a ways, and dropped the nets. Immediately they were full of fish, a catch that had never been before, and would probably never be seen again. It was enough to start breaking the strands of the fishing net. They just barely got it into the boats, which were then overloaded almost to the point of sinking before the net had been fully hauled up.

At this point, Peter had seen multiple miracles from his Master, but this was something he truly understood. He was unworthy to follow as this man’s disciple; it was one of Peter’s better moments. You can bet the other three were in agreement with this, after Simon took the lead. But Jesus said it was time to stop worrying about fishing in the sea and to start fishing for souls of men. This was the signal for the moment they probably were expecting, so they left the whole business in the hands of their relatives and servants, and took up the life of full time discipleship with Jesus.

Our narrative loop is closed; we have caught up to the point were Jesus calls His disciples full time.

Luke goes on to tell us that, in one of the Galilean cities, Jesus encountered a leper. Given how imprecise the term was in the Bible, we cannot be sure this was actually Hansen’s Disease. The label “leprosy” would cover a much wider range of afflictions on skin and extremities. The point is that there was a protocol under the Covenant of lepers warning off regular folks. But there’s nothing about this that keeps Jesus from touching the man, only a handful of rituals for dealing with ritual defilement.

The man announced that he knew Jesus could heal him, if He was willing. Jesus said He was willing, and this time it was the health that was contagious. Jesus instructed him to go through the rituals for showing himself cleansed, but the man could hardly contain himself and the good news even as he made ready to make the long hike to Jerusalem. It seems the primary reason Jesus wanted the man to go straightway to the Temple was obvious: He already had too many people crowding around Him and there was never enough time to be alone with His Father.

It’s doubtful anyone can explain what it was like for Jesus. If you don’t experience that deep longing to spend time alone with God, no one can make it more clear. The power of Creation itself resides in the personal relation between Creator and Creature. The mission of the Messiah called for even more of that, because He was in the awkward place of being the only sinless soul in an ocean of deeply afflicted people, His own family. The primary problem was that all these sorrows He encountered were the result of how they had all been alienated from God and the Covenant. The power to overcome lay in renewing the one thing Jesus had that was missing from all these lost sheep. It was necessary to keep His cup full if He was going to put something in their empty cups.

Luke doesn’t give us the whole setting for the next event. At some point in His tour, Jesus returned home by boat to Capernaum. He tried to rest, but within a few days folks realized He was back and crowded around Him at Peter’s home. So He went through another teaching session, but this time He knew the audience included a significant number of Pharisees who were snooping around.

The pattern had already been established back in His first visit to Judea after His baptism: Jesus presented Himself as a rabbi, but wasn’t following any of the established schools of teaching. Instead, He taught from His own authority, and had the audacity to back it up with miracles. He made the Pharisees look back, so they sent inspectors to team up on Him, looking for some legalistic flaw according to their traditions.

So, while He was teaching, some enterprising fellows brought a paralyzed friend, but couldn’t get in the door. The homes of men like Peter had one main entrance on the street, then a walled-in courtyard, and then the house sat at the back of the lot. Typically the wall around the courtyard was continuous with the walls of the house. It was rare that the flat roof wasn’t used for something like storage, drying stuff in the sun, a patio of sorts, etc. These fellows came around to the back side of the walls of the house and found a way to climb up on the roof. They bore their paralyzed buddy up to the flat roof surface and tore into it. It was usually dried clay, often in the form of tiles, resting on woven wattle, so this wasn’t too hard, but it made a mess and was pretty noisy in the room below.

Once they had a big enough hole, they lowered their buddy down on ropes tied to the corners of a blanket litter. They managed to estimate correctly, because the paralyzed man ended up hanging right in front of Jesus. Everyone was convinced by Pharisaical doctrine that anyone in this sad condition was most likely a sinner, and that he must have sinned in the womb to be born this way. Nobody was willing to grasp the idea that it was caused by how far the leadership of the Jews had drifted from the Covenant.

So Jesus attacked the real problem that must have troubled this man for years. He told the man that his sins were forgiven. Because of their legalistic training, the Pharisees immediately began rejecting the message internally. To them, Jesus was elevating Himself to God’s place. Jesus answered their silent arguments out loud. What different would it make if He had said either, “your sins are forgiven” or if He said, “rise up and walk.”

On the one hand, the paralyzed man needed to know he wasn’t at fault. Healing his body without first healing his tormented soul would be pointless, since the mission was to restore the Covenant that should have protected him in the first place. But then we are distracted by the question Jesus addressed for the Pharisees. The term “Son of Man” was simply Jesus’ way of saying that He was a human operating under that Covenant. Yes, humans can forgive sins, at the very least in that they can know the heart of God and announce that mercy is available, particularly in the face of false guilt.

But to ensure that they understood His authority under the Covenant, Jesus then told the man to get out of the litter and go home. This he did, having the presence of mind to gather up his litter and take it with him. He walked out praising his God, and the people broke into pandemonium. The Pharisees could not have said anything in front of this crowd. Nothing had changed their minds, of course, but they weren’t stupid enough to shout down such a celebration, even if they did despise the common people as accursed and ignorant of “the Law” as they saw it.

The trend of escalating confrontation is clearly established. Jesus was carrying forward the torch of His cousin, John the Baptist, calling for the nation to restore the Covenant relationship with the Father. The leadership were determined to protect their position by preventing that very thing from happening. They had long since surrendered to the idols of their own making, sticking the name “Jehovah” on a characterization of God that was vastly different from what He revealed through more than a thousand years of history. Jesus was pulling down their palace of lies by seeking to restore the ancient Hebrew understanding of things.

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