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.

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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.

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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.

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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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