Be the Fire

Posted on August 21, 2021 by ehurst

I am the fire.

During my military service in Europe, one of the best experiences for me was the NATO Chapel. Everything else pales in comparison. Never mind the complicated politics of how AFCENT HQ in those days divvied up managing the chapel, the largest contingent was the Protestant branch of chapel services. It was an excellent training ground in how to have a strong Christian community without denominational peculiarities.

This was a military provision, so you had to find common ground or you got nothing. The only “home team” was being military. Since this was everyone’s shared identity, none of us expected that our denominational eccentricities would dominate in any way. That was during my time there; near the end of my tour, it was clobbered by an extremely powerful group of Lutheran officers who took over the Protestant operations with zeal. They steamrolled everyone else, and the previous community dissolved.

But during their time in the sun, there was a very strong evangelical community operating out of the NATO Chapel there. It was one of the high points of my life of ministry. It’s not that I was such a firm evangelical at the time, already moving away from that, but that there was a very strong undercurrent of genuine faith, of convictions over reason. Nobody expected total agreement on all points of doctrine; we all just wanted to serve the Lord together. We found a generic Christianity that worked.

This is in essence what I sincerely wish I could inculcate in my readers. I’ve seen with my own eyes how it can be done. I can tell you that the “heart-led” language doesn’t travel well, but talking about “convictions over reason” found a very hungry audience. They made me the adult Sunday School teacher for several years running. When our chaplain was gone, I even preached from the pulpit a few times. I was also the song leader for a few years, and youth director for a couple more. It’s not that I was so wonderful at these things, but that they were hungry for any spiritual leadership, and I was on fire with a faith certainty they wanted for themselves.

This is how we are going to touch lives during the next few years, at the least. We must find ways to expose our shalom to others. When we do, they will want what we have. There is nothing about this Radix Fidem covenant that seeks to displace the organized Christian religion anywhere. We are focused on the hearts of people. It’s an invisible Kingdom we are pursuing here.

I’ve seen what God can do for a community willing to serve Him. I want you to see it with your hearts. It’s not up to me to decide what comes after I pass on, and I refuse to try. What I really want is to see something solid in the Spirit Realm manifested among us, something that lives its own life in us. I’ve seen how infectious it is. Spreading it takes care of itself. It’s not what you are or what you do, but who you are.

So I’ll keep appealing for people to become the fire that will change hearts.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Be the Fire

More Vax Info

Posted on August 20, 2021 by ehurst

This is partly hyperbole, and it won’t do anything to help change the minds of very many people, and that’s not why I share it. Rather, it is a good reminder of what to expect in the coming months: Dr. Sean Brooks on the COVID mRNA vaccine. This links to a video, which I’m told was recorded at a school board meeting in Ohio. That’s all I know about the setting. It’s all over the Net. There’s a PDF transcription of the presentation here.

Again, it’s partly hyperbole. However, the underlying drift seems accurate when compared with a lot of other stuff I’ve read. We should expect a lot of people who took the vax to die in the coming months. Some censored doctors have been trying to say the worst effects are long term. That doesn’t stay the Lord’s hand from healing you, but it also doesn’t keep Him from letting a lot of people die from it as part of some plan we couldn’t grasp. Follow your convictions.

Update: Okay folks. Stop and think about this. The vax is a self-selecting Darwin Award. If any part of what Dr. Brooks says is true, then a large number of people will start having major health problems in just the next couple of months. It will snowball. Think about who those people are. What will the world be like if a couple million folks — the kind who are eager to buy into the vaccine propaganda — all die or suffer catastrophic health problems? What does that do to the economy? The Internet? The medical industry? Government?

Posted in sanity | Tagged , | Comments Off on More Vax Info

What Can You Make of It?

Posted on August 20, 2021 by ehurst

This is not fully developed, but I can’t wait to share it. Some of you have discerned that something is cooking in the background, and we’ve talked about it privately. It’s bigger than all of us, thank God. We’ve all gotten bits and pieces of it. I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like it’s all one very big thing God is doing, far more than any of us realized.

I’m not the leader. I’m just one coordinator. Over and over again: This is not about me. I make a lot of noise to a small audience, but God forbid this rest merely on what I’m doing. I’d like to call your attention to something that I don’t believe is just a simple passing manifestation.

It’s more than just the coming apocalypse and persecution. That’s plenty big, and throws a lot of work into our laps by itself. You can stop there if you don’t get a witness in your spirit about it, but for me, it’s turning into just the background for something even bigger. It means a substantial change in how we view things just to see it.

I’ve referenced this week the long view of biblical Hebrew traditions. The hardest thing to get people to embrace is the concept that we are just a small part of something that is ageless. It’s really difficult to get our fleshly natures to accept the idea that God’s primary focus is way beyond the span of our lives. Granted, what I teach is shocking enough for some folks, just grasping the short-term implications of Biblical Law. Our culture does everything possible to keep the focus on the near term. But I’m pushing for an even harder discipline of taking up the duty to engage something that is so overwhelmingly big that we aren’t even significant.

It boils down to realizing that God doesn’t need us at all, but He’s willing to pull us into His eternal work, and share with us the blessings of that vast heritage. This is what reminds me that all my writing is just a bunch of noise, except that God chooses to use it to touch a handful of people. It’s a sense of privilege I cannot begin to characterize. He included me!

Something has been haunting me, and I’ve mentioned it to a few of you in private conversation: Francis Schaeffer and his L’Abri Community. At one time I wanted so badly to be a part of that. Now I’m so thankful it never happened. I suppose it wasn’t such a horrible phase to pass through, but it would have been an awful place to stay camped out. I owe one debt to Schaeffer: He pushed me to contemplate things on a higher level. That contemplation showed me just how wrong he was on so very many things.

I don’t want to build a counter to his L’Abri Community, but it does stand up in my own life as a bad example. His work has faded, in part because it was too deeply tied to politics and a host of other ephemeral things. It rested entirely too much on being a celebrity, and on having other celebrities involved. It was the passing fashion of human culture, and nothing more. How sad. To counter that requires stepping away from the whole model itself.

I’m not building. I’m trying to draw attention to something God is building. Standing with Haggai and Zechariah, my message is: You cannot imagine what God can do with you if you just get with His program. It’s not any one of us, but a whole community, a nation/tribe under covenant. This is why I’m working so hard to restore the meaning of the Biblical Covenant. There’s nothing to build; it’s already there.

So all my work is nothing more than digging up the hidden Temple of Truth that is not at all in ruins. It’s just buried under centuries of accretion, junk that hides the gospel message going all the way back to Eden. And it’s all about heading back to Eden in the first place.

All of which is just fine as the rhetoric to get you awakened to the necessity of our human effort in this world to manifest His glory. I’m hesitant to suggest it, but we can’t avoid using the term “organization.” Not in the sense of forming on a organization, but in the sense of doing something coordinated between us. Don’t join me; join the work of God in progress. Don’t let my vision restrict you. But for my part, I’m hoping to get involved in establishing a body of thinking about faith — that meta-religion thing I keep talking about — that is far bigger than my silly blather. It’s not defining faith; it’s simply exposing it within a given context.

You need to do what God called you to do. For my part, I want to point out how some of us together are doing the same work, but each in our own way. That’s what I mean about coordination. I want to show the unity within our varying efforts. Don’t leave this for me to put into a body of writing alone. If nothing else, your testimony will be a living contribution that will match this bigger picture, even if you write nary a word.

And some of you may continue doing this on the Net, if that’s your calling, but I’ve been commanded rather specifically to pull out of that. Someone else can continue that without me. I’ll keep blogging here, as promised, until it’s no longer possible for whatever reason. But a lot of what shows up here will be about that coordination. I need you to share with me what God is doing in your life. However it is you express that, I want to know about it. Share it somewhere else and I’ll link to it.

Many nights, as I lay down to sleep, I rejoice in the great things God has shown me, and I keep asking how it is I can tell more people. I can’t keep this to myself; it’s not just for me alone, or even just for the few of you who share in this Radix Fidem community. Surely there are more people God would like to bless with this. And I’m starting to get an inkling about how that will happen. I don’t own a Swiss chalet, I don’t have academic connections, and God forbid I should ever have the political connections that Francis Schaeffer had. Whatever it is calling to me excludes such things.

I don’t really know what’s next in broader terms, only that I really need to get some of my writings on paper. That’s the future of my part of this message, and it’s currently rather time consuming. Still, there’s a misty image calling to me from the distance, and what little I can make out is that we need to form a very strong community of people committed to something way beyond the current historical context. There’s something there on the other side of the coming apocalypse. Can you see it? Tell me what you can make of it.

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Proverbs Revision for Printing

Posted on August 19, 2021 by ehurst

Here you go, folks: AT-Proverbs. This is the latest revision and ready for printing.

Posted in administration | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Proverbs Revision for Printing

Thinking Too Short

Posted on August 19, 2021 by ehurst

One of the complaints of Malachi in the second chapter of his prophecy is the loss of a timeless viewpoint.

Across the entire Ancient Near East, it was a mark of maturity and good education if you placed yourself in a stream of very, very long history. You stood on very ancient ground, and your choices could either smooth the way, or make unnecessary challenges for those who come behind you.

In Malachi’s time — roughly 400 BC — the Hebrew nation had already used up 1000 years from the Exodus (roughly 1400 BC), and had not improved on the legacy of Moses. The ancient Exodus leader stood on a very solid foundation, with both Egyptian and Aramaic education, forty years of each. His career started at age 80. Every step of the way, it was obvious that Moses was deeply aware of his place in history. This was not his time to seize upon personal opportunity; it was his time to set the course for the future in the right direction. He endured hostility and privation for the sake of God’s calling.

By the time the nation had survived a millennium, it had frittered it all of that away. The people were persistently given over to their short-term physical comfort. There were no people left who looked at life the way Moses did. With the legacy of their national history, they had not pushed ahead on the same path, but had gone back to slavery.

And if Malachi’s complaint was justified, even more is it so today. We’ve had twice as long with Christian faith — two millennia — and nobody is talking about how to handle privation and hostility for a divine mission calling. There is no sense of “prime directive” based on Biblical Law. Well, you can bet the Enemy’s people have it. The upper ranks of Satan’s children do operate from a multi-generational perspective. They work specifically to deny that kind of approach to those they regard as lesser beings.

This is why everything in our culture aims at inculcating a short-term orientation. Instead of asking how your choices will affect your grandchildren, in terms of defilement of blessing, everything encourages us to think in terms of just a few years at most. Everything we touch is imbued with a very close horizon.

The greatest power of Biblical Law is how it keeps working to bless centuries later. Mankind might forget who we were or what we did, but God remembers. He sees and knows what is in our hearts, and savors it far into the future. You are and I facing tribulation and persecution. If we get too focused on our own discomfort, we will never understand how God works in this world.

Let’s make Radix Fidem something that keeps changing lives into another millennium.

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

Some Little Items

Posted on August 18, 2021 by ehurst

1. Is it possible to rebuild a biblical culture on the earth?

I wonder how many of you were aware that is precisely what I’ve been trying to do for the past 20 years of my life. We can talk about it in other terms, but I’ve been seeking to restore a biblical outlook. Of course, I’m not aping the ancient Hebrew people. I’ve been diligent to rightly divide the Word of God and to teach others how to do that for themselves, to cut down to the bone and recognize what is truly essential to such a culture for the part of the world where I live. We need the Word to sift the commitments of our hearts.

Yes, I would love to see a society arise, a people apart from the world, who resolutely refuse to assimilate into the local worldly context. Oddly enough, we could take some cues from Jews on that. We need to find that balance point between understanding the ambient society, but refusing to engage in their idolatries.

2. Through personal sources I have learned that a group of Americans were in Mexico a couple of weeks ago and the whole group came down with some kind of respiratory ailment. The local clinic diagnosed it as Delta variant of the COVID. However, one of the group was a physician from Las Vegas. He went home to his clinic and submitted samples for a lab test. It came back as a peculiar strain of gonorrhea that was not transmitted sexually, but like a common cold from micro-drops in the air. It infects the eyes, ears, nose and throat.

When the other members of the group found out and started treating themselves according to the doctor’s advice, everyone got better very quickly. While not conclusive proof, this serves to indicate that the so-called Delta variant is even more of a fraud than the initial pandemic was.

3. There’s only one way any empire could ever take and hold Afghanistan: colonize. It’s not enough to send troops. It requires creating a society with a culture and economy that eclipses whatever has been happening there for centuries. What the US military supported there was corrupt, to include actually promoting the heroine industry. The Afghan army that we built up outnumbered the Taliban and had much better equipment, but no will to fight for corrupt goons.

To be sure, the Taliban will stop the heroine trade again, as they did back the first time they took over. They’ll also stop the sex-boy trade that nobody wants to talk about in the MSM. You won’t get the real story of how things turn out in the future.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

It Cannot Be Fixed

Posted on August 17, 2021 by ehurst

This is not how things are supposed to be. We were never meant to be mortal. God placed us within His Creation as managers of some portion, a special place rather like a ruler’s private park. The park has always been mortal; it was always under a death and rebirth cycle. Not so for us. As managers, we were eternal beings.

As eternal beings, we were naturally wired to have an open line of communion with God. Our management of His park was not via some knowledge He implanted, but that we grew our knowledge from the divine Presence in our hearts. At some point when our knowledge had developed significantly, we were ripe for temptation.

We chose to break the living connection with God. We chose to operate from our human capabilities. At this point, He had to come looking for us, because He was no longer seeing through our hearts. And because of this, He could no longer allow us to remain eternal. We were forced into the same mortal form as the creatures in the park. Worse, we lacked that divine understanding of how things worked. We had to start from scratch, and it was a very painful process.

The whole point is to get us back into Eden. The path back to Eden requires dying, in the sense that we must shed our fleshly nature, our mortal frame. The normative process for this removal of the flesh is through divine revelation. It is our duty to voluntarily submit to this prolonged process of casting off the layers of deception and fleshly delusion.

In a sense, Eden is not in this world. In another sense, nothing in Creation has changed except us. We are still in Eden, but we cannot discern it as Eden. The problem is that the definition of “this world” includes being mortal in a place that was designed for us to be immortal. So instead of a nice private park, it’s a huge freaking mess of things we did blindly trying to make a life here without that divine understanding. We don’t know how this world works.

So instead of having a living connection to God’s understanding of His Creation, we are obliged to walk back through a prolonged process of digging into a written record of revelation and moving ourselves back into alignment with His revelation, to reclaim that broken connection we had with Him in the Garden of Eden.

That means forsaking all the human efforts to remake the world into a “better place.” It means drawing ever closer to Eden, where everything is how God set it up in the first place. We have to stop being so human, so mortal. We are required to start being eternal. The only way to finally return to Eden is to leave this mortal existence. We have to become so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good.

The Sword of the Spirit carves away all of our human concerns. It makes this world nothing more than some place to demonstrate for all to see that this world is not our home, not worth any concern. It will be completely wiped away when Jesus returns. What is worthy of our concern is His divine glory shining most clearly through our lack of interest in worldly things, and our obsession with eternal/spiritual things.

But in order to shine His eternal glory across the whole human race, He sends each of us into places, situations where humans are so busy pursuing advantages of this world, and we get involved only to demonstrate not pursuing those advantages. We play along with all kinds of nonsense; there are all kinds of ways to manifest His glory in the midst of nonsense.

In everything, we should be able to see clearly with the eyes of our hearts the best way for humans to do things, because we are permitted to reestablish some measure of that living connection with God. We can understand what His written revelation says about human activity. He speaks to our hearts about ways things could be brought closer to His ideals for this mortal frame of existence. Only in rare accidents does any human reckoning get somewhere close to divine truth. The rest of the time, humans are flatly wrong about what is going to work well, what is going to bring us God’s blessings, what is going to shine His glory.

We call it Biblical Law, the ways of God in a fallen world. People in the main want nothing to do with it. All their institutions, and even their civilizations are hopeless, false dreams of what cannot be. That includes America, regardless of what you may imagine “America” means. It was built on a rejection of God’s Word, and it will fall because of rejecting God’s Word.

Stop trusting the system. Use it for His glory; use it according to your mission and calling, according to the opportunities He puts in your hands. But the system is hopeless, built on lies. It was never what Christ taught; nothing mankind has done has ever been what Christ taught. And as we get closer to That Day when He returns, we have been warned things will only get worse. Step back and let the system fall, because there is nothing any human can do to stop it.

God has no desire to save it, because it was never precious to Him. It has never looked like His Son. There is nothing in Western Civilization that reflects the power of the Cross. It has always been founded on the sand of human imagination, an imagination that started out rejecting revelation. It was dead before it was first stood up.

Sure, we most certainly could do better, but nobody with any human authority is interested in that. Learn the lesson: Mankind at large cannot be subjected to Biblical Law by any means God has put in our hands. On rare occasions we can gather a tiny few souls who at least agree with revelation, even if they never quite rise to it’s high truth. The whole truth of divine revelation is provided as a standard that proves mankind is unable and unwilling. It is a testimony against humanity’s choice to trust their own capabilities.

The only solution is to live solely in seeking a blessed testimony in death. This world is of no real use to anyone. It is the realm of shadows and lies, and the only light you’ll ever see is in your own soul. This realm of existence is permanently broken.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on It Cannot Be Fixed

Spiritual Warfare: Epilogue

Posted on August 16, 2021 by ehurst

On the one hand, this series is finished. On the other hand, the Spiritual Warfare metaphor remains the fundamental image of every day Christian living.

What did we cover? Without a valid community covenant of faith, you have no covering against demons. Biblical Law is binding on Satan, and it requires a feudal covenant community as the starting point. Even a virtual covenant parish is better than nothing. If you embrace any valid biblical covenant, you are not alone, even if you never meet a covenant brother or sister face to face. This is where your covering starts. Then again, it’s impossible to live in this fallen mortal flesh without having some demonic presence in your life.

Satan serves God as His Punisher. The Devil is not God’s enemy, but ours. Satan is not now in rebellion against God, but he has been confined to a job that really sucks, especially compared to what he lost. Everyone in the world is born into darkness. Every soul whom God has elected was chosen before the world was created, so the issue is not spiritual birth. Nobody can do anything at all to gain election. It’s absolutely and entirely God’s initiative. Satan is not involved in that in any way, either. The issue is becoming aware of your spiritual birth, and the seizing your divine birthright.

So Satan’s whole job is challenging you in that process. He is supposed to strive to deceive people about spiritual birth, and then deceive them about what God has granted in this world under Biblical Law. Satan tries to keep you away from a clear understanding of covenants, feudalism and the nature of faith. That’s his job. You know what’s crazy about that? It’s really very easy to stay out of the Devil’s hands.

People do not sell their souls to the Devil. He has all souls by default already. There’s nothing he can do about their status, and he doesn’t really care. He may choose to torment some of them in special ways, but even that is mostly a matter of using those people as weapons to keep the Elect from becoming aware of their election, and to keep those who are aware of election from their promised blessings.

So the whole mission of Spiritual Warfare is to push the demons back out of your life. By extension, that means pushing them out of your covenant feudal domain that God has granted you. Your spiritual authority is limited to that domain, and only your convictions can show you where the boundaries are. There is no objective truth about this; you have to learn what God has given you specifically. It’s a matter of gaining a spiritual discernment about the unseen Realm of the Spirit. That requires being heart-led (AKA conviction led), where the heart is the center of our conscious awareness instead of the fallen intellect. No two of us will have exactly the same experience in these things.

The biggest barrier to believers prospering in this invisible Covenant Kingdom is the mass of deception built into cultural mythology. American Christians are weighed down with a huge mass of lies about Satan and the Spirit Realm. Most popular teaching about Spiritual Warfare is woefully misguided. The biggest lie is that America can and should be a Christian nation.

There is nothing at all we can do about the political situation in the US. All the claims to being a Christian nation are a joke; it was never true. This has never been a covenant nation, and the mass of humanity outside any valid covenant have no clue what God is about. It is impossible for the US to obey Biblical Law because it is impossible for the US at large to even comprehend God’s will. In effect, He has precious few covenant sheep in His pasture, and the US is like the rest of the world; it’s like cattle with no clue what’s going on. Most of His prodding and herding of cattle is done through a mixture of demons and angels.

There is no way for anyone outside of a valid covenant to please God, to participate in shalom. There is nothing blessed in America to save. The entire nation is serving Satan’s purpose, with precious few exceptions. Any effort to make the world a better place is doomed. Christ is coming back to destroy everything mankind has done, and it won’t be remembered. The only thing that God keeps before Him are the moments when you walked in the otherworldly purpose of His Word.

Worst of all is the American obsession with the modern State of Israel and political Zionism. It’s all one big lie; Israel’s god is Satan. The whole purpose of Israel is to deceive believers. Parallel to the political Zionism is religious Judaism. Judaism is the single greatest body of Antichristian activity on this earth. It is directly opposed to divine revelation, hiding it from themselves and as many others as they can possibly influence. But any hatred for them is also a part of Satan’s work. They are our biggest single problem on this earth, with all their infiltration and espionage into every human activity, but they have no power to stop the gospel message when God’s people obey Biblical Law.

So, in Spiritual Warfare, our battlefield is our own souls. We must turn the Flaming Sword of Truth on our own fleshly nature; we must nail our fleshly nature to the Cross and keep nailing it back on there all day long. We must embrace the whole of Biblical Law, and strive to form feudal covenant communities of faith. We must exercise dominion according to the Word. There is nothing to accomplish except learning more about it and getting stronger in faith. We live for the invisible Spirit Kingdom in the hearts of people. That’s our whole mission.

This life is not precious. It’s a prison; God put us here because of the Fall. This is not reality; it’s just a place of shadows and deception. We shine the light of glory by walking in ultimate truth. When we get that job done, we celebrate going Home to be with Him.

So we obey Biblical Law and we form covenant communities, and then we harvest shalom. Nothing else we might do could possibly matter. Indeed, everything we do must feed into that divine purpose. We show forth the glory of the Lord to a fallen world. Biblical Law is a privilege; we are permitted to understand it and walk in, and keep the Devil out of everything God puts in our hands. We have nothing to do with choosing who will respond to our message, but the sacrifice of Christ lives in us as we touch everyone, regardless of their eternal fate.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Spiritual Warfare 07

Posted on August 15, 2021 by ehurst

Reminder: It is impossible to offer a clinical discussion of Spiritual Warfare. We are talking about the Spirit Realm; it’s the unseen and inexplicable realm of what we face every day that we live in a mortal frame. It is the ultimate reality, and it dominates everything we experience.

You could as easily discuss it in terms of good spirits and bad spirits. We are obliged to use parabolic language, and what matters most is that we gain a means internally to handle this essential element of serving the Lord in this world. Again, Spiritual Warfare is the quintessence of who we are as Children of the Lord. In parabolic terms, Scripture indicates that the good spirits (AKA angels) outnumber the bad spirits (AKA demons) two to one.

But even that isn’t as simple as it seems. As you personally experience it in your daily encounters, the difference between an angel and a demon may be nothing more than the context. The whole issue is what God wants from you and for you in that moment. Trying to nail anything down as objectively good or evil is chasing the wind. This is why I keep harping on there being no objective reality in the first place. When an angel deploys his sword of truth in your life, the issue is not some much the truth itself but your moral composition at that moment. How much of you is wedded to the lies of Satan? The same experience brings joy to some and sorrow to others.

The human demand for an objective and clinical frame of reference is rooted in the Fall itself. It is the quintessential expression of fallen fleshly nature. You must come to understand that faith is a divine capability that is typically the enemy of your fleshly nature, and that faith is inherently unreasonable, illogical. You simply are not ready to get very far with following Christ if you cannot employ the spiritual grasp that faith gives you.

And faith will tell you: A biblical covenant is the foundation for everything God does on this earth. Without a conscious commitment to a valid covenant, you have very little covering from Satan and his demons. It’s hard to imagine just how much trouble this causes. Most of it is unseen by human capabilities. The reason we have so much to say about demons, and not so much about angels, is that the vast majority of human perception is controlled by the former. If the fundamental task of Satan is keeping the Lord’s Children deceived, then it’s no wonder we are inundated with a vast idiotic mythology about the whole business of angels, demons and Spiritual Warfare. By faith, we simply must form covenant communities or we morally perish.

There is no objective truth about the spirit beings we encounter. There is only the lore of the Bible, your personal experience, your calling and mission, and the covenant community among whom you share your faith.

If there is any one thing that is most destructive to a community, or even a whole country, it is mishandling human sexuality. Nothing can cleanse or defile the ground on which you stand like sex. This more than any other human activity turns into a major battlefield for spiritual warfare. There is no middle ground; there is no such thing as harmless sex. You are either blessing the world around you with covenant sex, or you are cursing everything you touch with sexual activity that does not build up shalom.

And that cursing is more real than “reality,” and so very hard for us to see clearly with spiritual eyes. It calls to us on a level that nothing else can. This is why Scripture says such polarizing things about it. It’s the one issue on which the Bible comes so close to making hard, fast rules; it’s one of the few things in Moses that carries a death penalty. It requires the strongest level of moral discipline because the defilement is so virulent in the covenant community. At the same time, it is the one part of our human existence that offers such potent redemption.

Human sexuality is not merely a matter of Lust of the Flesh, but it sweeps in the Lust of the Eyes and the Boastful Pride of Mortal Life.

But there are other areas of our human existence that offer active battle grounds. How about music? Unless you are tone deaf, few things in this life will stir you to holiness or defilement like music. I often resort to a session of worship from a collection of music I keep on hand. It clears my mind, helping me to subject it to my heart. It drives the demons out of the nooks and crannies of my soul, and brings in the angels to guard my awareness.

I can’t tell you that this or that form of entertainment is inherently evil. There are examples of specific performances that are plainly good or evil, but the underlying thing itself is not so simple. It depends on your mission and calling, along with your talents from God. For example, I am always uncomfortable in any place where a TV is running. It’s much worse if I can hear it. You may be able to tune it out with ease. But no one should be able to deny the moral conditioning that comes from various forms of entertainment.

We can dispute whether this or that performer, or style of entertainment, tickles our interest, but it’s too easy to see the broader social effect of demons working through stuff that was consciously designed to destroy good moral values. Most of it has some drawing power, because God’s gifts can be abused. The people involved in producing some art hate the gospel. And everywhere we go, it’s become a part of the ambience that we cannot escape.

Finally, each of us is by mission and calling stronger at resisting evil in particular forms, and weaker at others. Another personal example: I have zero fear of haunted places. It’s in part because of my conviction that there is no such thing as human or animal spirits roaming this world. There are no ghosts, in that sense. Whatever is haunting a place, it’s always angelic or demonic. Those spirit beings may have a task keeping alive the memories of creatures whose lives were lost in various tragedies, for example, but no “ghost” can do anything to me. It’s always a demon or angel at work.

This is part of what I meant when I wrote in a previous lesson that Satan is bound by your mission and calling. He cannot do to you something that Christ does not allow. His mission is to confuse you about what God offers to His children, but there are limits, and they will not be the same for any two of us.

Again, your experience boils down to conviction. No two of us can possibly have identical experiences in this world. Reality is a person who knows each of us individually, and treats no two of us just alike. There is a vast range of things we all tend to experience the same; this is why I say the reality is a person. We all know the same reality, but we don’t experience it precisely the same. Around the edges of that common experience will always be unexplainable differences in clinical terms. God does not treat us all the same, because He did not make us all the same.

Yet by the same token, we can find ourselves in the midst of a defiled nation, and it will certainly constrain us in various ways. The best defense against that is a strong covenant community of faith to push back. We must carve a blessed reality by shared faith.

We all have demons in our lives. Some people we encounter will suffer that presence more strongly. A few will appear to be virtually without any personal control at all. There is no clinical explanation for the underlying problem, only clinical assessments of the effects. They may or may not resist clinical treatments. But the unseen truth of this world remains a matter of demons and angels doing what God has assigned them to do. So the issue is to work through faith to develop a spiritual awareness that stands on our calling and mission.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Spiritual Warfare 07

New Testament Doctrine — Luke 4:31-44

Posted on August 14, 2021 by ehurst

We note in passing that, while Jesus was at Cana, He healed a nobleman’s son who languished up in Capernaum. Then Jesus Himself went on up to Capernaum some time later. Our backtrack loop is almost complete.

Let’s review the context. Israel is still under the Covenant. Because the leaders had all but vacated the conditions of the Covenant, there was no hedge around the people to protect them. Demons came and went at their leisure; they had permission under the Covenant that bound them. The Father specifically places some of them in the path of His Son so that there can be a clear witness of the Covenant authority behind His teaching, for Jesus had laid aside His divine authority (Philippians 2:7) and operated as a man of faith under the Covenant. Jesus was calling His nation back to the Covenant.

Shortly before He called His disciples into full time service, He began a teaching campaign in the area around His new based of ministry in Capernaum. Instead of quoting a jillion other rabbis, He simply spoke from the Scripture and from His heart. It was readily apparent to those listening that He knew what He was talking about. While on this campaign, He showed up in the local synagogue for a Sabbath service.

There is no use speculating why a demonized man would be there, nor anything about how the synagogue leadership dealt with him, or if they even knew about this problem. About the closest we can come is guessing that perhaps he came to seek relief of some sort. From what we’ve seen already in the Gospels, deliverance at the hands of the synagogue leadership was highly unlikely.

At any rate, the demon spoke through the man, and it was obvious the demon recognized Jesus, using a specific title for the Messiah. The demon asked if this free ride for his ilk was over. Jesus had come to get His nation to repent and recognize Him as Messiah, but this kind of witness from a demon grated on His nerves. It was obscene and His irritation was obvious. Also, note that Jesus is not yet ready to declare Himself the Messiah, and the demons knew it would cause Him trouble. He commanded the demon to leave the man. The words are pretty specific: The demon tossed the man to ground quite suddenly and left him without any further harm.

John carefully leaves out all the details except how it seized the attention of the people attending services that day. There was no fancy ritual; Jesus simply demanded the demon leave and that was it. There’s a good chance the man was already well known as a victim of demonic presence, so there was no doubt in their minds what they had seen. It was obvious He had a level of authority they had never seen or heard of before. The news of this event spread across the entire region.

After the service was over, Jesus and His disciples went over to Peter’s house there in Capernaum. Sadly, Peter’s mother-in-law was bedridden with some fever. Peter’s family asked if Jesus would do something about it, a natural request, having seen a few healing miracles already. So Jesus went to her bed and simply spoke to the fever, ordering it to leave her body.

John makes much of this simple act of speaking to Creation as if it were conscious and alive, but sometimes out of place. Keep in mind that this is still the winter season when fevers were more common. It’s not a matter of inconvenience that justified His demand, but that things weren’t supposed to be this bad under the Covenant. It wasn’t just demons, but without the full protection of shalom, sickness was out of its bounds, too.

As soon as Jesus had done this, she recovered to the point that she got up to help with preparing the Sabbath meal. She needed no extended recovery time, as was common with people who beat back a fever. Things from there followed the typical Sabbath observance until sundown, which ends the calendar day. At that point, everyone within walking distance brought out all their sick and demonized relatives, seeking to have Jesus heal them. As He did so, the demons were still trying to cause Him trouble by blabbering about Him being the Messiah.

It was only natural that everyone wanted to keep this activity going right here in town. Jesus insisted that His message had to be taken to the other cities and towns in the region. This was His mission, to call His people back to the Covenant, so He visited synagogues all over Galilee.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on New Testament Doctrine — Luke 4:31-44