AI Infiltration

Posted on August 14, 2021 by ehurst

Some of you have asked me questions about my teaching. Some of you have asked my counsel on personal matters. I’m honored to serve you that way.

But what if someone was able to fake my ID and send messages that were subtly different from what I would actually send. What if they were able to make it sound just like me? What kind of damage could they do in your life?

Up to recent times, the kind of effort it would take to emulate my writings would have required a good bit of man hours, and for a rather paltry return in terms of the wider world. It would have to be someone pretty intelligent and skilled who decided that there was something to gain, something that would justify the heavy investment necessary to pull it off.

Now there’s an AI that can do it in a matter of an hour or so, simply scanning my published writings. And it could also scan my unencrypted email archive, if any service I’ve used kept one. Or, if any of the numerous servers that my traffic passed through were to scrape some of my messages for any reason — like the NSA and their massive server farms keeping a copy of just about everything.

We’ve also seen where AI can render sound and video recordings that could pass for almost anyone, given a good sample base. I’ve not done that much on the Net, so it’s not a valid worry just yet. My communications have been almost all written.

I’m not suggesting that someone will attack us in this way. It will most certainly happen to some people out there whose online activities are a target for such espionage. It’s highly unlikely anyone would think it’s worth their trouble to do that with our community. It’s more likely they would simply block this blog, and our forum, from being accessible.

But there they to try it, our community has an advantage here. First, I’ve often told everyone publicly to filter what I say, and not just swallow it whole. Second, I’ve encouraged people to embrace the heart-led consciousness, so that they have a solid link to the Holy Spirit for a vastly superior filter on anything I might say. I’ve encouraged all of you to use that and disregard anything I say that isn’t useful to you.

I’m pretty sure anyone faking messages from me would run into that filtering and, perhaps at worst, persuade you to simply stop reading my emails. That’s not much of a tragedy, really. I don’t take myself that seriously.

This is not meant to make your paranoid. It’s to help explain what I see in my visions, of some thick, dark cloud rising up on the Internet. That vision is part of what has driven me to move away from publishing on the Internet. At some point in the near future, that cloud will swallow the whole thing, as far as I am concerned. There won’t be any way to work past it.

Granted, if we all suddenly switched to encrypted email, it might prolong things. I’m not saying you need to do that, only that it’s something you might consider. You have to follow your own convictions (as always). There may be other technologies, but I sense that, in the long run, it won’t make any difference.

The visions don’t indicate if the Net will eventually get free of that dark future. I suspect I won’t live long enough to see either way. Still, this business of AI masquerading as anyone alive or dead is just another indicator of bad things coming in this time of tribulation.

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We Are the Gospel

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ehurst

In response to some questions and objections…

The Body of Christ is not confined to the visible organized religions called “churches”. It is a Kingdom of Hearts. The Cult is not a human organization, either. It is Satan’s project, his gospel message. It is a primary manifestation of Antichrist; it is Antichristianity. Its god is Satan, though the vast majority of adherents don’t know that. It is what Scripture refers to as an idolatrous cult where the idolaters are worshiping demons.

Anything sponsored by The Cult will tend to reflect the deception and the underlying organizational truth. The organizations sponsored by The Cult will not be as pure as The Cult itself. Thus, Zionism and Judaism appear separate because they work in parallel. A great many Jews belong to both, but there remains a very large body in each that does not cooperate much with the other. Human organizations can be complicated enough, but these are not merely a human organizations. They are run by demons, so it’s not going to make sense to us.

Trying to understand the hostility of Antisemites requires the same outlook: It’s something organized and run by the same demons as all the other projects of The Cult. Neither the Jewish nor the anti-Jewish cults operate according to human reason. They are based on faith commitments of the heart. It’s just that they are darkened hearts connected to dead spirits. Those hearts do not hear from God’s Creation, but from a perverse Enemy of the Gospel.

So in that sense, Jews do intend to take over the world. No, not every person claiming Jewish identity is directly involved. Most of them serve only as pawns to confuse the issue, but it’s fair enough to speak in broad generalizations that Jews are humanity’s single biggest problem in concrete terms. To a great degree, they already control most of the human race. How they go about doing that is a matter of faith, not reason.

Reason is simply how they implement things (tactics), not how they arrive at strategy. Their faith says they cannot simply walk in with a False Messiah and seize the helm. There have to be certain conditions met before that can happen. Many of those conditions we know about, because it’s all rooted in the False Messianic Expectations. However, there are some elements of this thing that remain obscured, and there’s reason to believe it has morphed over the years so as to remain secret.

A good rule of thumb is that some elements of their plans will always shift to meet changes in technology and what is actually possible. Some elements have to do with critical support from the ever-changing political landscape in other countries. Even more confusing is that Satan changes the human personnel from time to time, so that it appears on a human level that parts of the program have changed. However, the underlying mission will always be the same: to hinder the gospel.

Did it every occur to you that the fundamental commitment of Netanyahu was to hinder the gospel of Christ? Everything he did served that purpose. Same with his successor. Whatever else they appear to accomplish is drama; the sole reason such roles and people exist is to hinder the gospel.

So a major issue for us is to be sure we understand what the gospel message actually is. There is plenty of room for debate on some particulars, and you’ll need to follow your own convictions. However, be aware that keeping certain issues confused is the successful work of Satan, and quite often through his proxies in The Cult. Yes, I’m suggesting that a great many “Christian” organizations are friends of The Cult, knowingly or not.

Some of this stuff is about to yield dramatic changes, particularly on the Internet. I don’t think it will be a stomp, but there will be a serious battle with the advantage on the side of the bad guys, Big Tech. Permanent changes will come to the Net, and most of them will be bad for the gospel. There are some sane voices opposing in a secular sense, but there is virtually no one championing the gospel. Regardless of what the bad guys say they are trying to do, the real target of all this is censoring the gospel.

Ours isn’t the only message faithful to God, so while this is certainly persecution, don’t get sucked into a persecution complex. We are one of many targets, and I doubt this ministry even shows up on the radar much. But it will become targeted soon enough.

What I see coming is too complicated to summarize; I’m not fully conscious of everything my heart knows about this. Good questions can provoke good answers, because the queries provoke a direct response. Still, it’s going to be rough on me and anyone supporting me, for the obvious reason that God is allowing things to get rough on everyone who serves Him. It’s part of the process. He’s shaking His Body to see who will cling to Him.

The gospel is not a body of truth that can be defined and objectified into propositional statements. A major element in the gospel message is the people committed to it. If the gospel is not living and active, then it cannot be sharp enough to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. The gospel is not us, but we are the gospel.

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Spiritual Warfare 06

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ehurst

Unless you have more questions, I’m going to wrap this up. Here I cover one of the biggest lies of Satan. It’s going to require using esoteric parabolic language, but Asaph in Psalm 78 says it’s part of our divine heritage.

The modern State of Israel is a false front. Zionism comes close to being the real thing, but it’s still used as a mask. Judaism is another mask, but then, so is Antisemitism. I’ve talked about The Cult, but even that is just an approximation, the thing itself viewed from only one angle. It’s not just 3D, either. We are pointing at something that stands in the Spirit Realm, so it’s multidimensional. It’s not enough to simply say something about demons and idolatry, because we are trained to dismiss that kind of thing mentally. Once it has a hook on which to hang it, your fleshly nature wants to forget about it.

I have a recurrent vision of this thing as big, dark and ugly. It’s ancient, and trails off into the future, ending only when Christ Returns. It’s rooted in the Garden of Eden, on the ground where the seeds of the Forbidden Fruit fell after humanity first tasted it. But it’s not limited to that; it’s something that forms the core of all human resistance to divine revelation. It leads the way in keeping humanity enslaved to Darkness. And it has a character that we can indicate in some ways.

The particular demon in charge of this project is Satan himself, a task not delegated to his minions, except in particular assignments. The thing itself is Satan’s own. Paul calls it the Synagogue of Satan; that’s far more than just a harsh criticism of the Jewish synagogue system. He refers to something he also saw in esoteric visions of satanic resistance to the gospel. He was referring to the Spirit of Antichrist, but also those who worship that false spirit.

If the first problem is how to explain it, the second problem is recognizing that it’s very hard to pin down who among the worshipers are aware, partly aware, or pretty much blinded. Not everyone is fully conscious of what they are committed to on this. And the varieties of partial deception are too numerous to count. It’s a thousand flavors so that it has something to offer everyone’s taste.

Even the term “Satanism” conjures the wrong image. We use that label generically to refer to any endeavor that is contrary to the Word of God, but the term as we use it today arose from a specific religion associated with Secular Humanism. The people who chose that term did so to represent something distinctly contrary to what church folks were doing. The secularists were slapped with that label from church folks, and decided to embrace the label just to make their enemies uncomfortable. Genuine Satanism, strictly speaking, is a body of ritual that forces government to treat secular humanism on the same terms as church-based religion.

My point is that there is something I want to discuss that fits none of the common labels. So for now, I’ll keep calling it The Cult, but it’s more than what shows up in that article I published.

For now, I want to characterize this thing by pointing out how it is Satan’s ploy to get you focused on modern Israel. A reasonable proxy for this is Judaism, for which Antisemitism is just the mirror image of the same thing. The whole point is to keep you focused on “The Chosen” — the people whom God made to rule the world, as they think of it. They consider themselves their own Messiahs, and if they can’t get you to take that seriously, then they’ll provoke you every way possible until you are forced to take up some effort to shut them up. Since they hate everyone who isn’t them, it’s okay if the return hatred is organized into something like Islam. Love them or hate them, they will not allow you to ignore them.

So, for example, The Cult runs the American Democratic Party, and has no problem with the internal conflict between those who promote BDS and those who are Zionist. The Cult is also quite happy that the American Nazis and Black Muslims actually get along just fine, for the most part — they both agree to hate Jews. But The Cult runs the Republican Party, too, via the more uniform and open Zionism for which Republicans are famous. As long as it’s all about Israel, The Cult doesn’t care who holds government offices in the US.

Every other issue is a cover for what The Cult is actually doing. Sometimes it’s necessary to deceive the masses about what government is actually doing for Israel. Thus, the COVID nonsense is a cover for other operations, one of which is called the Great Reset. All the furor over vaccines and lockdowns is just a cover for something hideous going on in the background: Israel is gaining access to global surveillance of all humanity.

Were you aware that Mossad is a major software maker? Some of it is masked as consumer apps and so forth, but the real money is in surveillance malware sold to governments. What few of these government customers realize is that Mossad has a backdoor in everything they sell through all those front companies, allowing them to keep tabs on everything. Mossad in turn is the espionage arm for The Cult.

I can tell you that we don’t even know the half of what Mossad is doing to our computer devices. Their handprints are all over the place, and that’s just the stuff we have found out about. Every time a new revelation breaks out about some secret project, it serves primarily to prove there’s a whole lot more we don’t know about. And of course, they are helping drive the market that makes it mandatory for everyone to carry a device through which Mossad can spy.

So what’s the righteous response to all of this? It’s not that we should close our eyes to the snooping. Rather, on the one hand we expose everything we can. On the other hand, we point out just how impotent it all is in the long run. Point out that Israel’s true god is Satan, that Judaism was adopted by Satan when God disowned it at the Cross. Publish that.

Recognize that virtually every problem in the world at large today is, in one way or another, a big PsyOp of The Cult to derail people from the gospel message. All those ugly secular political and economic -ism theories? Every one of them is a Cult PsyOp. All those organized religions? What they didn’t actually start, The Cult has hijacked so that it serves their purposes. Even the existence of Israel itself is a big PsyOp to keep people from actually getting fully engaged in the revelation in Christ. As long as people keep asking the wrong questions, Satan keeps everyone enslaved. The mere existence of Christian-Zionism is a major Satanic victory in the world today.

Thus, I can warn you that a fundamental element in Spiritual Warfare is learning to deal with all this crap and misguidance that avoids taking a direct look at the Cross. Sometimes you just cut through the crap; at other times the Lord wants you to at try answering the great mass of lies about things. Trust your own convictions; you’ll know what you need to study and what you can ignore.

All I can do is tell you what God is doing in my soul, and hope that it helps you see more clearly what He wants to do in yours. The gospel is not what you say or do; it’s who you are.

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Psalms Revision for Printing

Posted on August 12, 2021 by ehurst

I’ve finished revising the next book: AT-Psalms. It’s ready for printing.

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Nothing Else Matters

Posted on August 12, 2021 by ehurst

I’m not the first to discuss this: The Old Testament makes mention of spiritual birth.

When Nicodemus interviewed Jesus in John 3, we see the elder man’s confusion over the concept of spiritual birth. But Jesus answered from within the Covenant of Moses, so it’s not as if this was a new teaching, but a forgotten teaching of the Covenant. Take a look at the following passages: Psalm 51:6 & 10; Jeremiah 31:33-34; Ezekiel 11:19-20.

You’ll notice they don’t call it spiritual birth, but use a different parabolic image to say the same thing. This is not unique to the Hebrew people alone. They were well within the traditions of the wider Ancient Near East (ANE). That tradition assumed a priori that it as impossible to use clinical language for moral and spiritual matters. Rather, it was necessary to use symbols, parables and metaphors to talk about that sort of thing. They assumed the mind could not handle such matters, that only in the heart-mind could one discern the unspeakable truths. Outsiders to the Covenant would speak of Old Testament saints as having a spirit of the gods in them. They knew about spiritual birth, too.

The Old Testament never doubted the need for spiritual birth, regardless of how you want to verbalize it. It was inherent in the story of the Fall. God warned that if you insist on using your human capabilities to decide good and evil (AKA eating of the Forbidden Fruit), then you would spiritually die. Adam didn’t physically die for another 900 years after being driven out of the Garden, so God wasn’t referring to immediate physical death. He was referring to being forced into a mortal frame (AKA driven out of the Garden), which up that point was not a problem for Adam and Eve. Once having lost their spiritual nature (AKA access to the Tree of Life), they now needed a spiritual birth. They needed their faith and trust in divine revelation reborn.

So the assumption from the start was that this life sucks, and our only hope is to endure until the Lord takes us Home. The Book of Job rests on that concept. In the Covenant of Moses, God introduces a regime of learning about His divine moral character. Across the entire ANE, this was the common assumption about the covenants human rulers offered to their subjects. The Code of Hammurabi assumes an understanding that law is merely an outline of the ruler’s character. You were supposed to get to know the ruler as a person by what he said was important. So what God did at Mount Sinai was not entirely new, but an unusual implementation of an old idea.

Thus, while God was promising to make life tolerable, even somewhat pleasant at times, nobody was supposed to forget that God was being exceedingly generous, when all of humanity starts out deserving a miserable life, a sorrowful death, and eternity in torment. It was widely noted that by embracing the Covenant, you could take a path that would make you closer to God. He was perfectly willing to offer His Spirit in the deal, so that you could gain your own internal compass about what the Law was meant to do. The Covenant would then make perfect sense to you, and you would have far less trouble embracing it. But based on what God does say about it, we know that the Covenant as the gateway to that spiritual birth.

You were obliged to exercise the one human capability God left open to all of the human race: You had to engage your heart of conviction. If you were able to make a genuine commitment of faith to Jehovah, you could receive His Spirit. Gee, that doesn’t sound so different from the New Testament, eh?

Later, the New Testament writers began stating more bluntly some of the basic assumptions that no one in the Old Testament felt it was necessary to discuss. They knew they were addressing Jews with a deep Talmudic taint that buried those ANE assumptions, along with Gentiles who never had Hebrew thinking in their backgrounds in the first place. The New Testament was not a radical departure from the Old. It was not new teaching, but renewed teaching.

The primary difference is that Jesus translated the Covenant terms and boundaries from an earthly political national covenant to an otherworldly spiritual covenant that included the whole human race. That was something akin to the original intent of Moses in the first place, in that you’ll notice all those references to taking the gospel to the Gentiles in the New Testament. But it was the same basic gospel as the Old Testament, but with new conditions. The one very substantial change is that, instead of passing first through the Law and the issue of national identity, one could simply make that same heart-led commitment in faith to the New Covenant, largely sight unseen.

You still have to go back and learn the covenant requirements, but you can do it with His Spirit before you start digging into it.

Paul’s language in Romans about the Elect and predestination is actually right out of the Old Testament, but almost nobody recognizes it that way. Paul even explains it in OT terms, using the Pharaoh of the Exodus, but people still don’t get it. “Jacob I loved; Esau I hated.” You don’t need to grasp that with your reason; it’s a matter of faith. Tell your reason to accept the premise and build from there, and stop trying to question the premises. That’s an ANE idea, too.

So, if we are all fallen and born into mortal flesh, then we are all born with dead spirits. We all need rebirth. Joining any church is supposed to give you a leg up on learning about that faith requirement God has never changed, but only if the church leadership is doing it right. Somehow folks are still assuming that Christianity can be jiggered into a national identity that somehow gets you halfway into Heaven. Thus, you would have to fall quite a ways to become Hell-bound again. Western Christians have this unquestioned assumption in the backs of their minds that you have to make some kind of effort to belong to Satan.

Wrong. You belong to Satan wholly and completely regardless of being a member of any church, and perhaps all the more so because you were born in the “Christian” West. Satan doesn’t put any effort into keeping folks, because the whole world, and all of its cultures and civilizations, belong to him by default. And as long as they belong to him on those terms, they are absolutely incapable of wanting out of his hands.

It requires a divine miracle. Nothing, nothing, NOTHING humans can do will change that. A mere human psychological conversion is not spiritual birth; sales-pitch evangelism leaves most people still spiritually dead. It’s no chore whatsoever for Satan to keep people in his domain. No matter what his captives do, they will forever remain captive. In that sense, they cannot possibly do anything pleasing to God. Mankind cannot possibly accomplish anything that matters; being human is the signature of futility. Everything mankind has done will be wiped away when Christ returns.

By the same token, Satan has no say whatsoever when God decides to breathe His Spirit into anyone anywhere. So the only real work for Satan is to do whatever he can to keep you from getting hold of the heritage that comes with that spiritual birth. You were selected from before Creation, so it’s just a matter of time from your human perspective until God finds a way to awaken your attention to that truth. The entire range of divine revelation is aimed at helping you figure out what comes with that spiritual awakening. This is why I say that Biblical Law is a privilege.

Thus, everything that matters to God takes place on the battlefield of the individual human awareness. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. All my blather about Spiritual Warfare pertains to this one thing: you becoming aware of what God intended for you. Satan spends no effort at all on anything except thwarting your awareness, and the choices you make based on that changed awareness. Nothing else matters.

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Spiritual Warfare 05

Posted on August 12, 2021 by ehurst

More Problems and Questions

In CS Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, he imagines a senior demon reveling in consuming great sinners’ souls. He complains that humanity is becoming commoditized, that while there is a vast bulk of souls to consume, the delightful flavor of a Nimrod is no longer available.

CS Lewis misses the point: Satan is not a connoisseur of souls. Heroic or spectacular evil is not a major element in what he does. This is part of the Western fallacy that Satan is somehow still in revolt against God. No, Satan serves God’s ultimate plans, and he knows it.

Humans are born captives of Satan. He already holds the bulk of humanity; he doesn’t have to do anything at all to gain souls. Nobody sells their soul to the Devil; he owns them already from birth. What few comments in the Bible we get about this indicates that when the Last Judgment comes, he will still hold that majority in thrall. The battle here is not over that majority of lost souls. This is the major flaw in Western reasoning that seeks to hold God accountable to Western morals. It doesn’t matter whether God would prefer to save every human soul; He says outright that it won’t happen. Our reckoning of Spiritual Warfare must include this factor as a given. We must embrace the certainty that relatively few will turn to Him.

Whatever strategic thinking we engage on serving the Lord must assume that there is no hope for that majority. Rather, our hope is to help the few, those who are somehow gifted by God with the ability to respond to our message. We do not adjust our message to capture a bigger portion; we must retain a strict expectation of high entrance costs in moral terms.

At the same time, we must push aside the reasoning that focuses on spiritual birth as the thing we expect to gain for others. Get used to the idea that, while spiritual birth is what happens on the Eternal level, there is no hope on our level of being able to even discuss it very much, never mind having no means to making it happen. There is nothing — absolutely nothing — we can do on our level about that. It is entirely a miracle of God. All we have to work with is the apparent awareness of other humans to the heart-led way of faith, once God makes their faith possible. Keep in mind that there are three things there: (1) it’s the heart-led way, (2) it’s the business of human awareness and (3) we have only the appearance, the perception that someone is part of our family of God.

Thus, the thing we deal with is a heart-led sense that someone is able to focus on matters of faith. That’s all we have to work with. It is part of our mission to more or less assume those folks are also spiritually born, because it’s absolutely impossible for us to know. They can know for themselves, but nobody knows the eternal destiny of another. All we know is what we can perceive with our hearts; it’s a matter of conviction alone, first and foremost.

Standing on that rock, we then recognize that the big issue is not winning the world, but helping a precious few to start manifesting the appearance of heart-led living in faith. And this is precisely what Satan is trying to defeat. He can do nothing at all about whether souls get reborn in Christ; he is limited to defeating those souls from seizing the whole of their divine inheritance while they are in this world. By corollary, our greatest efforts are aimed at helping presumably reborn souls to gain access to that inheritance.

Satan is not concerned about losing the mass of souls already in his thrall. He is worried about you and I finding our inheritance. He uses those enslaved souls to inflict distraction on us and draw us off track. We should have no illusions about saving that majority of souls he owns. We are commissioned by God to build a powerful individual testimony that witnesses to the whole world, so that our witness captures those precious few whom God intends to touch through us. Those are the folks who warrant an investment in energy and resources. But you cannot restrict the effects of your witness by choice; the restriction is in who is able to receive it.

The way to have a witness is through tribal covenant communities. A jillion varied and unique little communities that act like extended family households is the single strongest testimony we have against the current trends in the human race. The biggest victory of Satan is getting folks to dream of uniformity in all the wrong ways, and the persistent notion that all churches should somehow, someday all be joined in one denominational organization. I’m telling you: Satan loves that lie.

Thus, we should celebrate that there are so very many different ways to do religion. But we should do so not in the cosmopolitan sense of multi-cultural idiocy. Rather, we should celebrate that God is speaking to His unique children about being faithful to Him in ways none of us would expect. We should celebrate that it makes no sense at all to outsiders. Faith is inherently unreasonable on the human level.

Instead of heroic evil leaders, Satan revels in AI leadership that regards all of humanity equally as trash. This is critical to understanding John’s Revelation, in that John regarded the dehumanizing aspect of Roman rule as the single greatest evil, calling such dehumanizing rule “the Beast.” Satan doesn’t want a human ruling the world; the Antichrist is not a single person but an influence from Hell. The less human the rulers are, the better it is for Satan and his agenda of deceiving us about what really matters.

The vast majority of Christian organizations are far closer to the Beast than to the Good Shepherd. Clinging to some objective standard, versus the interpersonal relationship that is fundamental to Creation itself, is the Mark of the Beast. To depersonalize is to dehumanize. Churches are meant to be private families, not public facilities with corporate rules for association and membership.

Satan dreads having to deal with a strong covenant community with potent moral ties and strong convictions. This is why such communities are seldom recognized by secular governments, and often flatly illegal.

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Spiritual Warfare 04

Posted on August 11, 2021 by ehurst

Questions and Problems

One of the biggest problems we face in seeking a biblical understanding of Spiritual Warfare is the mythology of our pagan Western culture piled on top of the truth. The truth is still there, but it’s buried under a lot of trash. The bedrock of who you are supposed to be in Christ is shaped and placed by God. Each of us has a unique cornerstone upon which to rest the foundations of our existence. So the single biggest task up front is to discover what it is about your individual divine calling that Satan wants to hide from you.

This is behind my comment about demons being bound by your individual convictions. This is a major choke point in redemption. Our human reflex is to assume that humanity is more uniform in essence, and only superficially unique. This is the most dangerous kind of lie, because it’s a half-truth. Granted, there is a commonality in being born fallen and damned. And there is a commonality of experience necessary for us to communicate the truth of divine revelation. But human reasoning draws the boundaries in all the wrong places when it comes to where the departure points are between what’s common to us all and what God built into us uniquely.

This is why we have these massive, repressive systems of religion that crimp off the uniqueness way far down too low on the stem of life. It’s a human fleshly instinct to keep things convenient, and the greater the uniformity, the greater the convenience for those who run things. It makes it easier to pick out just a few highly talented individuals to herd massive numbers, because it can all be done in the flesh. There’s no need to sweat over the conflicts that naturally arise; you just pretend they shouldn’t exist.

Let me lower the boom on that: Human conflict is hard-wired into our existence. It is not a sin to fight; it is endemic to living in the flesh. Conflict is a given in Biblical Law. The only question is to observe all the revealed protocols for making conflict work to your spiritual advantage. Some tension you accommodate, and some signals the point of separation. And this thing is dynamic, so that it flexes with the context. The amount of energy and resources you spend handling that is a major element in our testimony to the world as a community of faith. Being able to bear with some tension and remain a community is a critical part of the witness. The business of bearing the tension is all part of the vast, unexplored legacy of faith within the covenant community imagery. Handling internal conflicts is a major element in what the Body of Christ does in the local setting of each church, and we should get comfortable with that.

It’s a lie of Satan that conflict should never arise. This is part of how he keeps us under his control. You as a unique servant of God must be strong in your convictions, but you must also recognize a conviction that makes peaceful coexistence a major element in communion. It’s not squelching differences, but becoming hardened to the friction. Being sensitive to conflict is what Satan wants for us. God wants us to learn how to do conflict properly, because that’s a major load of unclaimed blessings, so that conflict becomes merely accommodation of uniqueness.

I’ve said several times in the past that I cannot explain how it is that Satan profits from holding back our blessings. All I can do is place it back in the imagery used in Scripture. The primary source is the story of Joseph’s time in Egypt, because it is so typical of the entire ANE. Upon arrival in Egypt, Joseph was sold to a particular nobleman. His status as a slave meant that he held no property at all. His very clothing was provided by his master, along with everything else he used in his service.

The point here is that all the profit from his labor went back to his master. This is the image of what Satan does to us. We are born under his ownership. Keep in mind that the difference between slavery and prison is insignificant in the Ancient Near East. Going to prison meant becoming a slave for a period of time. If you borrowed too much and couldn’t pay it back, then you were a bond-slave who had to work off the repayment, but it was the same deal if you destroyed too much, even accidentally.

But you need not become the slave of the one you owe. It was common in the ANE to farm that out. If you were in debt to a lord, he always had someone on staff, a high-ranking noble, who took care of this for him. This is where the image of the sheikh’s left-hand man comes from: It’s the noble appointed to run the debt farm. During the time Joseph was in prison, he was a slave for the left-hand duke, the highest ranking non-heir under the pharaonic household.

This is the place Satan holds now. The Old Testament parables of him starting out as the “Covering Cherub” indicates that his current position was a demotion from all the fun Lucifer had handing the traffic between God and Creation. Now he’s forced to do something that isn’t fun at all. We cannot possibly understand how Satan gains profit from keeping us imprisoned/enslaved, but we know that whatever profit he does have comes from that. It is Satan’s job now to keep you from your inheritance, to keep sucking down your blessings.

The image is that God is pumping out those blessings whether you get them or not. It’s up to you to find the path that puts you under the showerhead of God’s provision meant for you. This is all parabolic, not a description. Description is impossible, but offering metaphors that give you a feel for things is how the Bible teaches in the first place. This is what Christ did throughout His ministry. Within this imagery, we can get an orientation, not a map. The details are there to experience, but not drawn out for us.

At least one way that Satan profits is rather clear: If he keeps you all tied up in knots not claiming your inheritance, it serves to keep others around you blind to the things you are commissioned to reveal. There’s a portion of God’s glory that is hidden by your failure to be all God intended for you to be. God portrays Himself as a nomad sheikh, the kind of ruler whose greatest treasure is His people. If you are hindering others because of your enslavement, that means the Father Sheikh is kept from full use of His own children’s talents to enhance His glory. It’s not that God doesn’t suffer, but it’s a price He’s willing to pay to keep things working as He designed them (this is the hardest mystery for us to absorb). Satan uses your failure to keep others in their failure.

This is why I hammer on the issue that “salvation” in the biblical sense is not spiritual birth itself — that’s ineffable — but your discovery, the recognition in this life that you have a divine heritage, that another better life is coming. The Fruit of the Spirit is not more souls added to your religious community; more souls is properly a complement to a good witness. Spiritual fruit begins with your victory over Satan’s efforts to keep you bound. The division between your individual progress and the effect it has on others is false; it’s all one thing in glorifying God. Drawing more people without that grand spiritual awareness is not the Fruit of the Spirit; it is not the glory of God.

This, in turn, is why I make so much of living your witness, but I offer nothing in the way of training to go out “soul-winning.” Soul-winning is patently fleshly and it’s no victory over Satan. It’s a psychological experience that bears very little correlation to actually discovering your divine heritage. Discovering your divine heritage is a miracle that no man can conjure. Getting you to join my church is actually a lot easier, and is part of the whole package of churchianity, and no threat at all to Satan. Churches are filled with people who have no spiritual identity at all, just a fleshly, psychological one. The presence of spirit-born people there is often despite their programs for adding numbers to the church roll. Living your witness is God’s plan for setting others free, regardless whether they join your church.

So, human perception is the field of battle. And it’s no surprise that this business of teaching a heart-led perception is the single biggest factor in seizing your divine heritage. The mind alone cannot perceive the spiritual realm. It will come up with all kinds of nonsense based on individual experience, particularly within a cultural milieu. This is why you should reject the vast majority of cultural fiction and entertainment, because it builds on all kinds of nonsense. It creates a false world that obscures spiritual reality.

You and I should be able to discern the hearts of others. This is part of the standard equipment, but the weight of a cultural background that militates against the whole business of heart-led living keeps us from doing this. It’s not a question of knowing the ultimate truth about someone, but whether we can do anything with what we discern. What does God want us to do with that person? We have a ton of church-based rules that interfere with that process.

This ANE imagery chokes our Western minds. We have to plow up paths that have been long stomped down hard in our souls running differently from the pavements of divine truth. We recoil at the idea of a God who commissions Satan to use trickery. It feels like our notions of fairness are hard-wired; the logic about that is compelling. They aren’t hard-wired, but it feels that way. It’s a hard thing to embrace a spiritual reality that hits our mental perception the wrong way. But the burden of changing is on our backs, to bring our thinking in line with reality as God designed it. It requires unleashing the power of the heart in ruling over the flesh, to include the intellect. This is the real battlefield of Spiritual Warfare.

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Spiritual Warfare 03

Posted on August 10, 2021 by ehurst

Don’t be caught in legalism, because that’s just another lie of the Devil.

The bulk of popular mythology about fighting demons stands on a legalistic application of English translations of New Testament events. Without taking the time to understand the context of these events, it becomes mere rote ritualism to insist that all encounters with demons must follow some formula dreamed up by enthusiasts.

Why were there so many demons among the Jewish population in the New Testament? Was this somehow the unadvertised norm that Israel suffered in the Old Testament, too? By no means. There are two basic reasons for Jesus to encounter so many demons.

1. It was for His glory. Jews knew what demons were and how they worked. The Old Testament does provide the bulk of what we know about Satan and his operations. So the Hebrew people had learned to recognize the signature of a specific demonic presence that bound people. They should have known how to deal with this problem, but the meaning of the Covenant had been hidden from everyone. This is the heavy current against which Jesus had to keep wading. What Jesus faced was often a set-up from the Father designed to point out that Jesus was His Son, and to prevent anyone mistaking this. The demons had no choice but to serve the purpose of glorifying the Son.

2. It was contextual to the Covenant Nation alone. These people were bound because the Judean people had lost their way. They could have known they were off track, had they not been so wedded to the fleshly comforts of avoiding the deeper truth of the Covenant. They had drifted into legalism long before the rise of Hellenism among the rabbinical schools; the Aristotelian logic simply offered a better excuse for it.

The kind of demonic problems, the distribution of them in the population, and the remedy were peculiar to the Covenant context. The unique status of Israel before the Lord had a lot to do with what Jesus confronted and how He dealt with it. This means that you need to exercise that “rightly dividing the Word” discernment to know how much of that matches your context today. Blindly seizing upon the words and making it a rule is just the kind of thing the Devil did to deceive Israel in the first place so that he could pepper them with demons.

To a lesser degree, the same could be said of how the Hebrew Apostles handled the demons they encountered in the Gentile world of the Mediterranean Basin. This was an area that Israel should have already evangelized with the Covenant of Moses. They had done a very poor job of that; what little evangelism they performed was for the Talmud, not the Word of God. So the situation we see in Acts, for example, is rather unique to the situation of Hebrew Christians dealing with folks their forefathers left in the lurch.

It’s not that you and I today in the US are facing no demons. The issue is that the types, distribution and solutions are unique to our context. Some of what we see in the Bible does apply. In some places, it’s rather literal in application. In most of it, we are obliged to discern what we individually should do to counteract Darkness in the context.

I have my answer to this. You should develop your own. To the degree we get the same guidance in our hearts, we should endeavor to work together in this mission of cleansing the domain of the Lord — our lives. We hold our feudal domains as vassals of the Lord. When He brings His people to us, we seek to offer as much help, and the right kind of help, for the needs at hand, according to our commission.

There is no obligation that you mimic the dramatic silly posturing of some folks who are just so certain they have this all figured out. You aren’t obliged to denounce the demons aloud. You aren’t obliged to use the popular Charismatic terminology about such things, nor repeat their formulaic ritual denunciations. That’s not the only thing to which demons respond. My experience has been that, the vast majority of the time, all it takes is helping the victim to make the demons unwelcome by their choice to embrace Biblical Law.

You and I are now the Covenant Nation in our hearts. We cannot force the new vintage to fit into old wineskins. While being under a single culture of faith might be convenient, even somewhat of an ideal, it isn’t happening. There is no single rule for Christian religion. There will be cultural variations, and within any particular culture, even more individual variations.

Don’t be discouraged from trying to learn all you can about this. Sift through it and keep what’s appropriate for your commission from God. This is not some game of gotcha where you have to enunciate the proper legal notice for the demons to depart. It’s more a case of providing the guidance and strength for people to leave the demons, however it is they can.

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Spiritual Warfare 02

Posted on August 9, 2021 by ehurst

Spiritual Warfare is simply the quintessential metaphor for being a Christian. This is the biblical image of serving an ANE feudal master as newly adopted into His household. We are striving to claim the fullness of being His child, with a particular focus on bearing fruit for His domain.

This is the image inherent in Ephesians 1; Paul uses the term that should be translated as “economy” rather than “fellowship.” But more importantly, it conjures the image of an desert sheikh seeking to build up His household wealth and influence. We seek to make Him famous (AKA, glorious).

But His greatest treasure is His people, His household family. And it is only natural that He seeks their welfare. However, it works by allotment; we each have a certain collection of inherited blessings that belong to us. We increase His domain’s wealth and influence — His glory — by how we reclaim and occupy the lives He has given each of us.

So the biggest problem is not Satan, but His children who resist His will, who do not engage the mission to reclaim their lives from Satan. The Devil is a feudal punisher under God’s authority. There is no outside agency here; God owns it all. The biggest problem is that His children keep running off outside the boundaries, and the only way He is going to keep us inside the high privilege of His blessings is to appoint the Devil and his demons to wander the outside and capture the children that won’t stay home.

The demons are permitted to entice you outside the boundaries. If you fall for it, then they gain access to your life. That we are all born in sin means that we start that way, captured and enslaved outside the boundaries. God calls to us to come join Him inside the boundaries of His household. We spend the rest of our lives struggling to get back inside of Eden, the divine household. The first thing we face is the Sword of the Spirit, the Word of the Lord. That Sword is also the Cross; it must impale our souls and kill the fallen fleshly nature.

And it’s by our own hands that the Sword/Cross pierces us through. Otherwise, it won’t happen. If we don’t turn that weapon first on ourselves, we can’t use it at all. The domain of Satan in our lives is that fleshly nature. That’s the limits of his power to operate. Thus, our commission is to spend the rest of our lives constantly recapturing the fleshly nature that will not stay dead, will not stay on the Cross. As long as we are burdened with a mortal existence, that is the image under which we live. We keep denying the fleshly self; we keep nailing it to the Cross.

Yes, our God and Father operates this way. He keeps the Devil out there in the Fallen Realm and the demons can use all sorts of tricks to draw us out. As soon as we step outside, we discover that our fleshly nature has come down from the Cross and has followed us out there where it can rule and “live” the existence it desires. It is the prime ally of Satan in our lives, that zombie of fallen desire that takes over our lives so quickly.

There are a host of fallen people out there who remain surrendered to Satan. They are victims, too, but we cannot allow them to appeal to our fleshly nature. They all have demons running their lives. On some rare occasions, those demons will seek to step over to our fleshly natures, to give the zombie a little extra strength to hold us back from returning inside the boundaries. The most common path through our awareness is subtle, a matter of operating in the background through temptation. However, sometimes it’s far more open and direct, with the demons welcomed consciously. That’s when things get spooky.

But whole business can be spooky for us when we are perceptive enough to see it. We are wired to sense this directly, to know when something is less a latent response and a more in-your-face taunting from the Darkness. No two of us will see it quite the same way. What taunts you and I in the face may be shrouded to someone else. That’s because no two of us are called, commissioned and empowered to respond in exactly the same way. How you are supposed to influence someone else may well be different from how another believer gets the job done.

So, a critical element in defeating Satan’s grip is knowing the boundaries of which believers are supposed to be on your team, and which believers are supposed to be on some other team. Don’t work with believers who disrupt your commission. It has nothing to do with what they intend, and everything to do with what God intended. He has children we should avoid for reasons He never explained. But this becomes a critical element in Spiritual Warfare. You must pull in the harness with those who pull as you do, whose manner of service complements yours. If you team up with the wrong people, you simply give Satan new openings to interfere.

This, too, can be contextual. This time you work with them; next time you don’t. It may well be permanent, but you must be wise enough to recognize what God wants you to do. That’s one of those tests of faithfulness. You need to know who belongs to your spiritual clan, and who does not. It’s not a question of whether they belong to the Kingdom, but whether you have any business working alongside each other at that moment.

It’s not that there is only one path for all back toward Eden. Rather, there is only one path for you. The Lord will post signs that you should recognize as parts of the dominion He would grant you. “Explore this area! Come and occupy!” Sometimes, once conquered, you might well be asked to pass it off to another, or simply leave it behind for someone to claim it later. You might be asked to remove stones, while another will plow, and yet another plant the seeds.

Not every act against Satan’s dominion stirs epic visions. Just removing a badly placed stone is an act of Spiritual Warfare. It brings some portion of God’s promised blessings closer to reality for you or someone else. But their welfare is your welfare, because it all belongs to the King and His Kingdom.

This is the parable of Spiritual Warfare.

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Spiritual Warfare 01

Posted on August 8, 2021 by ehurst

Let’s get one thing straight: It is honestly impossible to write a study course on demonology. You could learn what I know by working closely with me long enough to see how I do it, but you would still have to learn your own lessons, and some lessons may well be non-transferable.

This is rooted in the very nature of understanding the Spirit Realm in general. One of the greatest flaws in the English speaking world is the false assumption that all truth can be approached logically and systematically. Moral truth is living and active, and cuts like a two-edged sword. It’s contextual; context is everything. God didn’t simply engineer everything and walk away. The totality of Creation is alive and sentient. It interacts with us on the basis of Biblical Law and living moral guidance from a living God.

Demons are also alive. There are some restraints on them that we can teach. It’s all part of the fundamental issue that Biblical Theology is universal, while Systematic Theology is peculiar to the person making the system. It remains one of the biggest lies of Western Christianity that the truth can be systematized for human intellectual consumption. Reality is fungible; one man’s reality is as good as another’s. A very large portion of how you act on your faith will be yours and yours alone. The same goes for your interaction with the Spirit Realm in general, and demons in particular. What one soul experiences will be different from that of another.

For my own sanity, I make the following general statements when I share with others about Spiritual Warfare:

1. Demons are bound by Biblical Law. It works on two levels, just as Law does in everything else. On the obvious level of practical particulars, demons are limited in what they do to deceive any community. Notice that they are bound by the fundamental requirements that Law is tribal, feudal and covenantal. They respect the boundaries of moral dominion that God delivers into the hands of His servants. If you are not committed to any particular community covenant, you are wide open to Satan’s interference in your life.

But it also works on the higher, moral level of ineffable truth. Demons are bound by your convictions. All the more so when you consciously speak those convictions where you, and God, and all Creation can hear it. It means to Satan what it means in your heart. Your mission and calling are his battleground in your life. He cannot do to you some of the things he can do to someone else, because Jesus stands before the Father keeping things just according to His Father’s divine moral character.

2. Enforcement of Biblical Law against demons requires knowing the Father and His Word. This should be an obvious corollary of the previous item. You must know Biblical Law, because your effectiveness is limited by the depth of your knowledge. The stronger your heart-led convictions, and your awareness of them, the more authority you can wield to protect yourself and others from demonic interference.

3. Demons serve to personalize everything. The whole point in this imagery of spirit beings with dark powers demands that you embrace the idea of a universe populated by all kinds of other beings. The only way you can be effective in standing against deception and perversion is the sheer power of seeing it as all personal. When you begin to work in someone else’s life, the single biggest barrier will be human resistance to coming under your moral dominion. People instinctively seek to make you accountable for their protection, but without surrendering to your authority. Stay sharp on the moral limits of what you can actually do. The second biggest problem is that their demons will do what they can to come upon you and those who assist you in this fight.

4. It seldom makes sense on a human level. You’ll need to get used to the accusation from others that you are paranoid and delusional. Get used to thinking of yourself as an outsider to the common culture of the West, largely because Western Civilization was designed by Satan.

5. The bottom line: Satan is our Enemy, but not God’s The best way to understand how Satan operates is to see him as God’s loyal servant. He is God’s left-hand, the feudal enforcer and jailer. If you step outside of the boundaries of Biblical Law, Satan will be there to capture that part of your life. His primary profit is to absorb all the blessings God promised you under Biblical Law; he takes what belongs to you.

We are born in the situation where he consumes what God says is ours. The job we have is to remove ourselves from his captivity by bringing ourselves in line with Biblical Law and conviction, to reclaim those blessings. We need the mindset that Biblical Law is privilege, not restriction. It is a privilege to know what God revealed about His Creation and how things work. God’s Law is always in our best interest. Satan’s job is to tempt you away from that understanding.

6. There is no such thing as “demon possession.” To live in a fallen, mortal state is to be compromised by some measure of demonic presence in your life. The issue is reclaiming and occupying the territory of your soul. Some issues will forever be contested in battle. It’s on you, as God’s feudal servant, to guard the borders of your life and be ready to defend God’s claim on you. Your soul is the battlefield, not some external space-time turf.

The grounds for driving demons out of the lives of others is that demons are using that victim to intrude on your divine domain (AKA mission and calling). You have a much stronger position and authority if that person has sought your spiritual dominion, your moral covering. But by far, the vast majority of Spiritual Warfare is the victim doing their own “exorcism” by surrendering some troubled part of them to the Word and the dominion of Christ. You, as the servant of God, are merely His proxy in the daily details.

In other words, the business of Spiritual Warfare is simply the business of our feudal existence under Biblical Law. This is the perceptual context — the parable — under which we live daily. It’s not a question of obsessing over demons, but of taking for granted how they operate. It also means recognizing extreme cases as extreme, and that some things will forever be outside your hands because the Lord didn’t give that to you.

The key is to know your mission and calling, and to give expression to your convictions. Satan is constrained to honor that.

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