Washita River National Battle Site

Posted on July 21, 2021 by ehurst

We finally took that long trip out to Western Oklahoma. For most of the trip, it was simply a matter of Interstate 40 until we got to Clinton, OK. From there I-40 angles southward a bit, and we needed to head straight west. It was a bit of zigzag on some state highways, but we began seeing the hills of the western grasslands not far outside Clinton to the west.

Oklahoma has a massive windmill farm in the western third of the state. This is just a tiny handful of what is out there. Today the winds were quite low, so very few of them were turning. On top of that, we had a significant haze of smoke in the air from the fires out in the western US. Still, this turned out better than I had hoped.

This is more or less what you would expect to see on the state highways out in Western Oklahoma. These little highways are paved, but sometimes just barely. This being oil country, it would be asphalt, of course. But the rolling hills are typical, and our route featured plenty of turns, zigzagging around terrain obstacles.

We spotted this abandoned house about halfway between Clinton and Cheyenne. You can find plenty of these all over Oklahoma; we saw several others that didn’t present themselves so easily for the camera as this one did. It’s apparently used now as storage for the ranching equipment, because a very large cattle chute system was just behind it, along with very large machinery hidden behind the crest of the hill.

One of the biggest things to see out around the Black Kettle National Grasslands is the Washita Battlefield site. This is where the notorious General Custer (then a Lieutenant Colonel) attacked a Cheyenne-Arapaho campsite with almost no warriors, just women, children and disabled older people. This visitors center has a museum for the battlefield, but the lower half of the building is federal offices for the grasslands.

Behind the visitors center is a very lovely view of the Washita Valley, just west of Cheyenne, OK. To be honest, it’s seldom this green. This part of the state has gotten a lot of rain since last fall, so it’s really quite green. This area is actually rather dry, so this makes for a unique opportunity.

The short little trail near the visitors center offered a few things like this mock-up of a standard sod house. From the photos I’ve seen, a rock front was rather rare. Still, it’s not a bad mock-up. It would be hard to convince me this was one actually used by settlers who came out during the Oklahoma Land Run.

This is an up close of what grows naturally in the grasslands. Keep in mind, it’s greener than normal for mid-summer. But this is what the federal parks system is trying to preserve by designating this a national grasslands. The little guided walk teaches you all about the various kinds of plants here. I note that the place was thick with sand plums and I picked a couple that were just a bit larger than normal around my neck of the woods. But there were a few other plants that are edible if you know how to use them.

The park also featured a classic windmill, but what was most interesting is what no one gets to see most of the time: what stood at the bottom. Granted, the original water tanks were often considerably larger, but this is accurate otherwise. This one actually works, pumping water when you release the windmill to turn.

The actual battle site is a mile or so west of the visitors center. This plaque was just about readable enough to capture with my camera. There’s a long trail the runs down to the actual campsite on the banks of the Washita River. My knees weren’t up to hiking, so I had to forego. Still, the basic story is nicely summarized by this plaque.

There is also this stone monument to the main figures involved. This whole site is treated like a cemetery by the government, and as sacred ground by the Native American tribes. Indeed, for the natives it didn’t matter whose blood was shed, and it turned out a significant part of Custer’s war party were killed when nearby tribes came to rescue the Cheyenne-Arapaho camp.

This is the view from inside the pavilion. I was really hoping to spend some time just sitting there and getting a feel for the place, but there were too many other people wandering around. Still, the pavilion is very nice; the shade is from a very thick roof that blocks the heat of midday.

Tomorrow: More shots of the grasslands, plus Antelope Hills.

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We Are the Exiled Nation

Posted on July 19, 2021 by ehurst

Let’s think this through with our hearts.

I’ve written repeatedly that the Radix Fidem path does not include any particular encouragement to rebel against evil government. We take it for granted all human government is inevitably evil, unfailingly driven by demonic impulses. Instead, our default teaching, consistent with the New Testament, is that nothing of lasting importance comes from any political activity. That was a major emphasis on the Gospel records regarding the Temptations in the Wilderness. Jesus came to restore the original focus of the Covenant, which is to create a spiritual mystical culture, an otherworldly focus. He specifically rejected taking a political path.

It’s not that Israel was never supposed to go to war, but that any warfare was overwhelmingly guided by the divine purpose. That purpose ranged between genocide of those whom God Himself condemned, to mere deterrence of those who were opportunists, and everything in between. Many of God’s commands make no sense at all on a human level, but it always remains consistent with the heart-led moral truth of revelation.

And with the national covenant closed once and for all at the Cross, most of those considerations are greatly reduced to a firm strategy of avoiding political conflict in favor of trying to stay out of the way of such things. Politics is a distraction from the divine mission. But that does not keep us from understanding how political wrangling can work (or not) over the short term. Were we motivated by considerations of national identity and such, we could construct a biblical strategy for political activity, even as we cynically doubt it would accomplish anything worth the trouble.

Let’s try to untangle this: Whatever anyone might salvage from the very confused American identity is frankly Anglo-Saxon for the most part, with a little bit added in from other sources, virtually all Germanic. If you are going to promote an American identity as the foundation for resisting the globalist evil monster, you have to be honest about what it is. You can make it all culture, but that won’t stop a rather valid accusation that it is for white folks. It works for other races if they embrace the culture, but it’s fundamentally a white culture. You have to decide that racism is not a sin, and then figure out why God wired us to be race-conscious in the first place. I’ve written plenty about that and we won’t pursue it here.

But the reason we have to focus on that is because the Enlightenment is the basis for the political system associated with American history, and we really need to ditch that. Democracy is the god that failed, and trying to call it “republican government” isn’t going to make it any better. There is no useful distinction between a democracy and a republic; both assume that man is essentially good, but misguided. That’s a lie from Hell. It’s the Forbidden Fruit; it rests on the very foundation of the temptation in the Garden of Eden. The only hope is to restore a tribal social structure, which is built into the Anglo-Saxon identity, along with all the other cultural influences on which the American identity rests.

It’s not biblical, but it’s about as good as America can get to restore some version of Medieval feudalism — provided you can make it a firm tenet to avoid consolidation of empires. It must remain decentralized.

By now you realize how impossible this task is. It’s not going to happen, except perhaps in a few, small scattered communities. But this should indicate something you really need to keep in front of your awareness: the massive tsunami brainwashing that prevents anyone from stopping to openly admit what’s real here. As long as the American identity is poisoned with belief in the system — the utter failure that is the US Constitution — no one is going to mount a valid resistance to the evil oppression upon us all now. As long as the resistance is restricted to trading rah-rah memes and videos, as if it were actually possible to turn the system around, there will be no valid resistance at all.

The globalist enemy owns the system. It was theirs when it was first designed. The US Constitution might be sly about it, but the whole thing was designed to enable elitist control, even as it promotes the lie of “everyone is equal.” The Myth of Equality is a two-edged sword. On the one edge, it is flatly false. This is not the reality God made. On the other edge, it gets you to believe in that lie so you can be manipulated. The US Constitution was composed by folks who had rejected a much more fair and realistic system; the Constitutional Convention members completely ignored their mandate.

Do you understand that Q-anon was a PsyOp? It kept everyone busy chasing sparkly dreams of things that could never exist. Do you understand that this vast network of faux political resistance is just another part of the same PsyOp? This idolatrous reverence for a false system of politics is the whole point; it guarantees that there will be no valid resistance to another Tower of Babel. It’s a trap. You cannot beat the oppressors by remaining within their mental prison.

And if you can see this, then you understand why the New Testament discourages getting involved in politics. People outside the Covenant are hopelessly stupid. They are cattle who will not follow the voice of the Shepherd; they have to be herded, and it’s a very messy and manpower intensive task. It could happen in theory, but as long as God doesn’t see fit to enable on the ground a system that actually works — Biblical Law — then we take that as a sign He’s not interested in making it happen.

What’s left is for us to live by His Word as a testimony against the false systems cooked up by bullies among the cattle who don’t know what’s going on. Those who follow Christ are like a nation in exile for as long as this world stands. We have to adapt to that existence and remain faithful to our witness within the context. The Kingdom of Hearts has no formal earthly existence.

This world is not our home; we are the Exiled Nation of Heaven.

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Until the Lord Changes It

Posted on July 18, 2021 by ehurst

Kiln of the Soul is not gone; it’s quietly waiting the day the Father appoints to manifest it to the rest of the world. We are all arrows in the quiver. For most of us in the Radix Fidem community, our next mission is not yet fully revealed in action.

I have a burden to share, a vision of what should be. It’s not really in my hands to make it be, but it’s my job to be available when the time comes. We say the Word is God’s revelation of what’s real; it’s how things work in the world He made. More to the point, it’s how we can come back to what He intended for us. It’s a journey that takes us farther and farther out of this world on the way to Eternity.

This revelation must first burn in our hearts before it can come to life in our hands. I’ve spent some years exploring what that revelation demands of me. I’ve done my best to declare what I’ve found, and it seems some folks have found clues for their own sense of calling in what I’ve shared. Not only do you embrace the lessons of Radix Fidem, but you sensed a call to also participate the Kiln of the Soul — making me the elder of a faith community.

Kiln of the Soul is not for everyone. Some of you should feel led to find or build your own religious practice. In this, we could say Radix Fidem is the “denomination” with individual churches, and my church is called Kiln of the Soul. If that’s how we see it, then let me point out the our denomination off-loads a lot of particulars to the individual congregations, without a centralized structure of any kind. The only shared identity is summarized in the list of particulars that explain Radix Fidem.

It’s quite possible all of this could die with me; I’m not trying to change the future by promoting my personal faith boundaries. What I do hope outlives me is the centrality of conviction as the final rule of all religion. That’s the same as saying “heart-led” in the sense of putting human capabilities subservient to conviction, because God writes convictions in your heart. That’s the symbolism of the Tent of Meeting; it’s your heart where you commune with the Spirit of God. If that one thing spreads and carries on, I can dance with joy in Heaven.

So, I have this vision that, somewhere in my own future, my testimony will be raised in some social setting I don’t yet see. I didn’t set out to become a recluse; it just happened as a consequence of things I felt God demanded of me. Like John the Baptist, at some point I’ll come out of the wilderness and begin preaching where people can hear me. It will be some setting in meat space, not online.

In my head, at least, whatever fellowship comes with that I’ll call “Kiln of the Soul.” It will be my church, regardless of whatever else it may appear to be. Or perhaps I should say, that name will represent how I order my own interaction with such a group. Kiln of the Soul will be the name for how I draw boundaries in my service as shepherd elder. It’s not that my virtual parish will be excluded by any means, or that I would love you any less, but that the bulk of what I do in the flesh will be focused on that real-world group. A virtual parish becomes an extension of that work.

Nor should you imagine that this vision must somehow become reality. That’s missing the point. The vision is what ought to be; it’s the goal regardless of how things turn out. It’s the foundation of my plans. Everything else is just the means to that end, until the Lord changes that vision.

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New Testament Doctrine: John 3:1-21

Posted on July 17, 2021 by ehurst

We continue with our backtrack loop of Jesus attending Passover in Jerusalem before going into full time ministry up in Galilee. After a day of cleansing the Temple and performing miracles on the crowd visiting the city, Jesus receives a visitor from the Sanhedrin. While we could speculate on any number of different reasons why Nicodemus came at night, the most obvious reason is that he hunted Jesus down after He was finished with all this public activity.

We have to trust that John’s translation of an Aramaic conversation has been rendered properly into Greek. We should rightly have some small doubts about how it was further rendered in English. There’s a whole library of discussion about what this conversation would have sounded like in the native language of Jews at the time, but in the end, it’s just speculation.

Nicodemus had a question on his mind. He stated immediately the nature of the conflict: The Pharisees could see clearly that the nature and results of the miracles were the hand of God. The unspoken question was obvious: Why was Jesus’ teaching so very different from that of either the Pharisees or Sadducees? It was a genuine question. Nicodemus had studied the Covenant his whole life, and revered his teachers. He was utterly convinced that what he knew was God’s revelation, yet Jesus flatly contradicted much of it. How could God provide backing for something contrary to His own revelation?

Without waiting for Nicodemus to lay out this conflict, Jesus abruptly jumps to the real issue: You cannot understand God’s Word and His purpose without spiritual birth. If all you have is your fleshly capabilities, you’ll never recover what was lost in the Fall. The implication is that Nicodemus was operating in the flesh, not the Spirit.

Here I’ll depart from the mainstream. I take the position that Nicodemus wasn’t stupid about the meaning of whatever Aramaic words Jesus used to mention spiritual birth. He likely had quite the brilliant mind. Rather, his instinct was to reject the message behind Jesus’ words. His question about crawling back into a mother’s womb was typical of Jewish sarcasm. Nicodemus was insisting that being born Jewish was all the qualification necessary for being welcomed into the coming Messianic Kingdom of God. His rabbinical traditions (now collected within the Talmud) put him in a far better position than average to have a clear grasp of what God said and what it meant. Nicodemus was among the Jewish elite.

Jesus goes on to reassert His position: If you don’t have a spiritual identity, you cannot even understand God, much less enter into His divine realm. Implicit here is that the Messianic Kingdom would not be political, but spiritual. The Covenant promises were primarily a matter of Spirit, not mere physical reality. The whole issue was the Pharisaical insistence that Jewish political independence, and furthermore their political dominance, was a divine necessity. But the goal of the Covenant had always been a change in human nature, not a change in the human condition in this world. You cannot deal with God as a Spirit unless you are born into that higher realm. It’s like trying to catch the wind.

To this Nicodemus replied in essence that this was against everything he had been taught, and everything he himself taught. Jesus noted this was not a good situation, since Nicodemus was one of the instructors of Israel. How can Israel come to their intended destiny if the highest ranking teachers of the nation cannot grasp the ultimate spiritual nature of things?

Jesus elaborates. He and His disciples were simply telling what they had experienced directly. Yet, without having walked in their sandals, the Sanhedrin rejected this testimony of things these men had walked through. “It didn’t happen!” Jesus and His disciples had kept it pretty simple, without any speculation or extrapolation; it was a simple matter of, “This is what God has done for us.” If the Sanhedrin dismissed what these men had experienced directly, what would be the point of trying to explain what’s behind their experience?

Then Jesus adds, by the way, His credentials. None of the Sanhedrin, nor any other human they could find, had been to the visit the Spirit Realm. Yet here was Jesus, a regular human for all to see, who was saying that He had come down from Heaven, where He had held the position of the Divine Heir. You doubt that? How about those miracles, which none of the Sanhedrin could do, with all their expertise?

Surely Nicodemus could recall the Exodus, in the part where they encountered the fiery serpents? Moses had to put a model of the serpents on a pole so that everyone could see it from a distance. Then they could turn in faith and be healed. So it would be with Jesus the human. He would be exalted by some means so that anyone could turn to look upon His message in faith and be healed.

It’s hard to be sure what follows starting with verse 16 is Jesus still talking or John editorializing. I take the position that it was John echoing things his cousin Jesus had said during their time together. However, we can bet Jesus said something approximating this to Nicodemus.

God had compassion on everyone, so that He was willing to sacrifice His only Son so that everyone could find their way back to Him. What Jesus taught didn’t just reaffirm the Covenant, it clarified it in a way mere words could not. The Jews made it a tenet that the world was worthy of death just because it wasn’t born Jewish, but God had always intended to offer redemption to the world. Israel was supposed to convey that redemption, but never quite got around to it.

Well, it turns out that the basis for God’s wrath was not a matter of DNA, but faith. Refusing to bow the knee to Him in feudal commitment is the only ticket to Hell, and everyone was born with that ticket. God revealed the whole procedure for redemption and acceptance into His household, but even Jews got too deeply involved in what they could do to make themselves happy. That shining light of revelation embarrassed them, so they hid in the darkness. They were unwilling to sacrifice their human desires for redemption’s privilege.

But there would always be some drawn to the light of revelation, and they willingly confess their sins. Then they go on to walk in that light and proudly display their privilege for all the world to see. That’s what Israel was supposed to do, not grovel in darkness. Jesus came to renew that light and that calling, and it wouldn’t result in a political kingdom.

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Welcome to the Apocalypse

Posted on July 16, 2021 by ehurst

At this point I’d be preaching to the choir if I made any more noise about avoiding the “vaccine” for this faux plague used as an excuse to destroy the economy and introduce unconscionable oppression. But I wonder if you knew that the US Government had some 73 patents on this particular virus since 2002? That little point was news to me. I have always believed it was a bio-weapon made in the US, but I wasn’t expecting such explicit detail to be revealed.

Now, I can warn you that I don’t wholly trust Paul Craig Roberts, but even when people pursue self-serving ends, they often end up telling us very useful things. The picture he paints in the linked article is true in type of a great many sorrows we face these days. The system has seized control of all means of resistance except the one disaster they want most to provoke: a civil war.

What the globalists don’t understand is that they will lose this war. In fact, all parties will lose. It’s not going to turn out as anyone expects. You don’t have to be a prophet to see that; a quick review of human history will tell you that. This how war works in this world; nobody ever gains what they start out wanting. Things inevitably take directions no one expected, because no one has realistic expectations. At this point in history, it appears the globalists are more deluded than anyone else, and they have their hands on all the levers.

The thing I hope you are watching, and what you catch from Roberts’ article, is the system of thought control. Do you understand how mainstream religion does the same thing? It’s the same overwhelming wash of false messages drowning out the truth. If you embrace the Radix Fidem approach to religion, then you should understand that we have no friends in this world. All we have is each other.

I’ve mentioned our Prime Directive of keeping the gospel message alive. The challenge is how that commitment shapes everything we strive to do in this world. It’s not enough to know what has been written regarding God’s plan for living in this fallen world; we must absorb the wordless understanding of the heart.

If things weren’t so utterly rootless in human existence right now, we would be talking about building a community of faith in terms of the tribe. We would talk about how to go about pairing up people of faith to build families of faith, all aimed at building the shalom message so it’s big and loud. And while that community building remains a proper model, the current context makes it shockingly difficult to even talk about it. This is a really bad time to get married and start families.

It’s not impossible to build good marriages right now, but that is simply not the primary focus of implementing the gospel message right now. We don’t have the conditions for encouraging that. This problems we face are very similar to what Paul’s letters say in discouraging marriage. The Roman Empire of his day was moving toward that same level of smothering propaganda and social disorder that we face today. It’s not that Christian religion should inhibit marriage on principle; quite the opposite. But this is how we respond to crisis. “Woe unto those who are pregnant or nursing” was what Jesus said about the coming time of persecution (Matthew 24:19; Luke 21:23). It’s a warning that, do what you feel led, but don’t be surprised when it doesn’t work out too well.

Paul was writing shortly before, and during the early stages of the time Jesus prophesied. So for the same reasons Paul gave, we currently ask people to put away those dreams of a good Christian marriage with family. Not that it cannot happen, but that it should be put on the back burner. By all means, seize it if the Lord grants, but don’t be surprised if it turns into crap later. That’s the nature of our times.

Over at Sigma Frame, Jack has been discussing over the past year, at least, some of the details of why marriage is so very hard, particularly for Americans. He and his commenters have been exploring the complexities of how and why things are so messed up in the marriage market. And the overall message simply serves to remind us that a blessed marriage is a miracle from the start, even in the best of times. These days, the vast majority of society has been so damnably twisted and perverted that it’s a wonder we don’t see mass suicides.

And in some ways, we do see mass suicide, in that society has gone into full blown self-destruct mode. It’s just doing it rather slowly, instead of all at once. Each generation is smaller in numbers and has far fewer opportunities for building a decent future on any terms, never mind on biblical faith. It reflects just one more factor in a world gone mad. Do you see how the propaganda and oppression of a false health crisis is the same stuff as the marriage crisis?

Welcome to the Apocalypse.

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Random Photos 12

Posted on July 15, 2021 by ehurst

The crews took a couple of weeks reworking the lower dam on the OK River Recreation Area. The water formerly flowed around both ends and had eaten away a section of the embankment on the near side, and to a lesser degree on the other end. So they simplified the structure and put up walls to reduce that kind of washout, then reinforced the washed out section with more rip-rap and covered it with concrete.

I normally avoid taking pictures of homeless encampments, but this one was abandoned. I had seen a couple of guys living in it a couple of months ago, but they are gone now. I thought it was cool that they didn’t have trash piled around, but when they left it, they didn’t bother to disassemble it. There are quite a few of these makeshift shelters along the OK River Recreation Area.

I finally went back to Midlothian Road, running across parts of northern Lincoln County. I wasn’t interested in the unincorporated community called by that name; I just wanted to see the road. It had been recently plowed with a road grader, so the gravel was mostly in the middle, and it was like driving on marbles. There were places where it was really steep and the county road crews had spread some kind of fine yellow gravel on it, which tends to clump and stick almost like concrete. Despite the dust, I greatly prefer driving on it when dry.

There wasn’t much to see from the road, mostly because the heavy tree growth along the ditches obscured everything. Still, I spotted a few nice places like this cattle pasture with a stock pond. I was intrigued by the rock outcropping in the background.

Farther down a couple more miles were more stock ponds, but without the livestock this time. Still, there must be kind of grazing animals, because the grass was quite short compared to what grows everywhere else out here. This is maybe knee high after resting a bit, but wild grass out there is almost head high right now.

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Some Spiritual Warfare HOWTO

Posted on July 13, 2021 by ehurst

Priority One: Keep in the forefront of your consciousness that it’s all about God’s glory. That’s the root cause, and final end, of everything that matters in this world.

The primary objective of spiritual warfare is killing your fleshly nature. You want to be less worldly, less inclined to view things from a fleshly perspective. That includes the emphasis on being conviction-led, and keeping the mind in subjection to the heart. Let this world go. It’s not what you do in this world that matters, but how and why you do it.

So, in pursuit of a greater divine awareness, you’ll run across things that provoke your spirit. The next question is: What should you do about it? What does God want from you at that point? What does that burden signal to you about your own soul? Keep a clear eye on the defeat of the flesh when you ask that question.

The other day I was provoked about something. I felt that someone had gone too far in blaspheming the Lord’s name. Take a moment to consider that this is any action that pulls God down to the human level, or elevates man to God’s level. It need not be a direct insult to God, but one that is implied by elevating the flesh and insisting it’s a matter of divine revelation. In other words, there are a great many things fallen humans do that insult God, but when does it seem to cross into the domain God gave you?

It can include a matter of someone for whom you are praying, as another burden from the Lord. This was the case for me a couple of days ago; someone I was praying for had crossed the line into blasphemy, and it was a particular blasphemy that I had warned them about some time ago, and which others had warned him quite recently. He forcefully rejected the rebuke.

Since this person never listens to such things, the issue becomes a matter of bringing a curse upon themselves. They were opening the door to demonic presence in a rather significant escalation. At this point, I knew in my heart that I had some authority from God to pray about this matter, to kneel before Him in expectation that He would act.

It was not as if I was “calling fire down on the man’s head” in the sense most people think of it. Rather, I was asking God to pour out His cleansing power on my domain, particularly wherein this fellow was a part of the grant from God. Do you see how that works? I was asking God’s wrath to fall on me. Wrath is a two-edged sword — it cleanses the righteous and the destroys sin. I wanted God to destroy the sin in that situation, and I was willing to have my own sin clobbered in the process.

In such a prayer, you can bet the Lord will answer to the affirmative. Count on it. His wrath did fall into my life. It had nothing at all to do with this specific insult to God. Wrath is often impossible to logically tie to the thing that invokes His wrath. You have to be sensitive enough to recognize that some hassle you are facing is spiritually tied to the thing you prayed about, often in defiance of what makes sense on the human level. So I went through some inexplicable hassles this morning, but when I bothered to spend a quiet moment praying, it hit me that this was the hand of the divine Punisher extracting his due for something he frankly lost somewhere else.

I decided I was quite willing to pay that price on the human level for a victory in the divine matters about which I prayed. It signaled to me that our Enemy was not happy with my prayer request, but had no choice in the matter. Further, it signals that this fellow who had insulted God was going to receive his measure of wrath, as well. I don’t have to know how it turned out for him, though it’s likely I’ll see some of the results later. The honest truth is I don’t know enough about his life to estimate what it will do to him.

My real goal is that this fellow repent. My mind realizes this is highly unlikely, but it’s the righteous goal of my prayer. I’m willing to repent and bear the pain of sorrow for nailing my fleshly nature to the Cross, a job that demands frequent repetition. How it turns out for that other fellow is not in my hands at this point. If he does not repent, it will cost him, and it’s unlikely he’ll make the connection until he does fall on his face before the Lord.

Thus, I have reached into the Spirit Realm to claim something that God says I can have. It will have a real-world effect. I wanted no part in selecting what his consequences will be, only that they be quite real and substantial, matching the depth of his sin. If the sin is destroyed, and he clings to it, he will also be destroyed.

There’s no cackling revenge here. I’ll be proud of my Father’s power in me, but I’d much rather win over a professing believer from his sin. It’s not about me or him, but the message of God’s glory. That’s always in my best interest.

This is the Christian Mystic way of “cursing” someone who did wrong.

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Damned PMA Gospel

Posted on July 12, 2021 by ehurst

I’ve been provoked by some folly I read recently. It was the PMA Gospel (PMA = Postive Mental Attitude). It’s a close friend to the Prosperity Gospel. It stands on the doctrine that mental and emotional feedback systems are somehow “spiritual warfare.” How you feel is not a goal of righteousness. The so-called “counsel of despair” is not in itself a sin, if the point is to remind yourself that flesh cannot be trusted.

The divine mission can include a glorious failure on the human level. It could well be the Lord wants you to go out and fail on the fleshly level so that His glory shines the way He wants it to shine. The divine call is to obedience, not to achievement. Yes, God does command us to do things that will not prosper in the eyes of man. God does call us to pursue things that appear futile. Spiritual victory is compelling the flesh to obey the Word. That’s it.

There’s nothing especially demonic about depression, if depression is part of your emotional structure. Human frailty cannot be overcome by human self-discipline. One of the greatest tragedies of Western Christian belief is the lack of faith, a complete lack of understanding it. I’m talking about faith as a separate faculty from the flesh. Faith does not reside in your head, though it will surely invade your mind from that higher faculty.

Have you read the Psalms? King David suffered from depression. That was not a sin; it’s human nature. The answer was not mere fleshly discipline, calling for a bright and sunny attitude in the midst of great sorrow. The answer was to trust in the Lord and be faithful, even when things didn’t work out the way they should have. It was never a question of outcomes, but being faithful to the revelation of God.

The heart can drive obedience. It can override the fallen fleshly nature. Don’t accept a false sense of guilt about fleshly failure. A strong sense of sorrow is not the hand of Satan, but false guilt over it is. Flesh fails; that is its nature. The penalty of the Fall is dragging around a mortal body with all its failures. This life is not precious; it’s just a nasty place we have to walk through on the way to eternity.

Nothing we can accomplish here matters. What matters is your commitment, your faithfulness in spite of flesh.

With that in your heart, you will understand what’s wrong with the Prosperity Gospel and the PMA Gospel. You will understand what’s wrong with drumming up the fury of the flesh against opposition. You’ll understand what’s wrong with all this happy talk nonsense. We are in a desperate time, and winning on the human level is something we should not care about. The only task before us is to remain faithful regardless of the outcome.

When you don’t care is when you’ve won. That’s what Paul meant when he wrote, “Be anxious for nothing” (Philippians 4:6-7). The good feelings are the reward from God for the victory over human care. Be confident in His power, not your own.

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The Story I Can Tell Now

Posted on July 11, 2021 by ehurst

I’m trying to learn how to hear my convictions, to follow the leadership of my heart. My convictions told me to shut down the old blog. I obeyed without being sure I understood the reasons for that decision. That’s how it should work when the mind lags behind the heart.

At least part of the reason is that a window of opportunity has closed. We have a message to the world, but it’s always been a two-edged sword. It is part warning and part offer. The offer remains open, but the time for warning is over, as the cutting begins. Warning to the world at large was the purpose of that old blog over the past few months, to advise folks of the coming wrath. It was mostly aimed at outsiders, and was accessible to them.

This blog is private, in that it does not show up much in search engines, and isn’t part of the automated advertising system connected with WordPress.com. We are running WordPress software on a private server account with no active support, versus the old blog which leased server space from WordPress, and got some limited support in the bargain. I have more control over how it works here, but that sacrifices the free publicity I had on the old blog.

In other words, the prophetic outreach is closed. That much is clear to me, but I sense there’s a lot more attached to that. Right now, I don’t have the words to express it. To me, it’s rather like this is just a smaller piece attached to something much bigger. All I can see is the part that touches my domain.

I’m sure there are other prophetic callings out there not yet silenced, but for me, it signals that it’s too late for some people, that certain events have been set in motion and there’s no turning back now. Even saying that is parabolic; we simply don’t have words to describe what it means. All we can do is make a crayon scratch image of it. I am not to concern myself with whether anyone outside our community is touched by the message.

So, the primary focus is making sure I am faithful to the community, to deliver whatever the Lord puts on my heart. Even that seems like it’s rather ephemeral. Most certainly I’ll try to keep the Bible lessons coming, to make sure they are published and accessible. Those have attracted the strongest reaction from everyone. Everything else is subject to modifications.

I’ve explored a lot of options for keeping in contact. I asked the question: How would I share those Bible lessons if different kinds of problems arose? There are too many to summarize. The current server is about as safe as it gets, barring dramatic changes in the Internet landscape. If I had to, I could reduce things to just an email newsletter distribution system. I guess that depends on whether I have your email in my emergency contact list, and whether your email service will accept such a thing from the various email services I use. I’ve had stuff bounce in the past for some of you.

On that note, let me reiterate that I still recommend getting an account with Proton Mail. They have both free and paid accounts available, and any communications we make over that system is encrypted, and remains on their servers. I’ll be using the address catacombrez@protonmail.com. The only possible challenge there is whether you can access that service from where you are at the time.

I know I linked to an article warning of grave possibilities, but for the most part, I expect disruptions will come from direct attacks on the financial and supply system, not the Internet itself. Communist China already has the Great Firewall limiting their traffic with the rest of the world, and Russia recently made moves to install a “switch” to cut themselves off from the global network if things get too intense outside their borders. Other countries have already used a similar switch to limit their citizens’ communications via the Net. Still, I don’t expect major disruptions to the Net itself.

Here’s something odd about the whole question: There is no doubt that the vast majority of computer geeks, including those who actually design and run all the background services that make the Internet work, hold globalist sympathies. And yet, it is the globalist leadership who has so far shown themselves least competent at using those services. The worst computer security failures so far have all been among the globalists. They have suffered the worst unauthorized disclosures, while their enemies have remained mostly secure. You get the distinct impression those of a globalist mindset truly do not understand the nature of computer networking, but that they also have the most to lose by exposure.

At any rate, I’m strongly convinced that certain things have changed forever, and it can be understood properly only from the heart as matters of eternal moral truth. I’m sure there are plenty of things for which God is still waiting to see how much, and what kind of wrath is warranted, but some issues that I’ve been working on are finished. I have no further message for the world at large.

My convictions lead me to prepare for economic collapse in the form of a long slow failure with several sudden disappearances of consumer goods and services. The best market opportunities will be in localizing things people previously took for granted from outside suppliers. All of that “just-in-time” delivery will collapse. Reduce your dependencies where possible.

The tension between states and the federal government will grow, but there will be no obvious final rupture, just a long list of increasing hostilities. It will appear to be mostly stumbling into various stages of a civil war. But at some point it will be obvious that it’s over. There will be no apparent organization behind the resistance, until way late in the game. There will be a violent backlash from the political right, but it is hopelessly incapable of getting organized, so it will be messy and without discipline. Then again, the left side only appears to be organized; they have already begun turning on each other.

Other predictions I’ve made haven’t changed: Big Tech will largely destroy itself. The tech business landscape will change dramatically. Israel will destroy itself, too, but that’s going to be a complete surprise. Mainstream American evangelical religion will suffer a huge shock, marked by an exodus, partly because of the leadership’s toxic obsession with Israel. You should understand that the vast majority of Christian Zionism stands firmly on how profitable it has been so far. A significant portion of the leadership is corrupt and cynical, not true believers at all in the cause of modern Israel. And make no mistake: The real Zionist Jews despise Christians, but will milk them until dry. They’ll throw evangelicals under the bus in a heartbeat.

And I know it’s very hard to grasp this, but there is a very secretive cabal who run the Zionist game, but they actually don’t give a damn about the modern State of Israel, nor Jews. It’s just a ruse, a way of drawing everyone’s attention away from something else they are doing to seize control of the whole world. It’s hard to pin them down because they are only sort-of-Jewish in identity. It’s part of why they exist as a group, but it’s not the whole story. They are the global bankers, but more than that. They’ll take a hit in coming apocalypse, but it won’t end their cabal. They’ll start over.

God alone knows what that world will be like, and I have no idea how much of it I’ll get to see.

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New Testament Doctrine: John 2:13-25

Posted on July 10, 2021 by ehurst

The task starts to get challenging. We will need to refer to a harmony of the Gospels before we go any farther. I’ve yet to find that I agree with totally, but in order to keep this simple, I’ll link to this one. Keep in mind that while Matthew, Mark and Luke seem to put most events in a chronological order, sometimes they group together events under a single theme, so that none of them is strictly chronological. John’s Gospel clearly isn’t, except in some parts.

The point here is to note that there is a very good reason from the Hebrew perspective not to worry too much about it. So much of what Jesus did requires contextual understanding in terms of the message, not in terms of events. I promised that this series would connect the teachings of Jesus to the Covenant of Moses, to show how the New Covenant grew from the same roots as the Old. For that reason, we will put things in a rough chronology, but there’s no point in being pedantic about it.

Thus, I note that we backtrack the chronology just a bit here because of what I see as a thread of importance in what Jesus taught early in His ministry. Last week, we left Him in Capernaum just as He is ready to begin full-time ministry, and had gathered half of His team of disciples under some unknown sponsorship. But a short time before He called them as such, He had gone back to Jerusalem for the Passover.

Keep in mind that, after the Exile, when Judeans returned to rebuild the Temple and Jerusalem, they never actually had a Judean king over them. The royal family was still around, but served as administrative clients of first the Persian, then Greek Empire. At some point during that warfare between the successors of Alexander the Great, the High Priest became the de facto political leader of Judea. The Maccabean Revolt was lead by priests. Thus, when Rome begins showing an interest in Palestine, Herod established himself by marrying into the High Priestly Hasmonean “royal” family. It split the politics once again between kings and priests, but Rome controlled both offices.

Herod had wiped out the Hasmoneans, so it fell to other priestly clans to take up the High Priesthood. We don’t know when it got started, but since the Temple was a priestly concession, and those who wore that “crown” were chosen by Rome for political reasons, including bribery, it’s no surprise that the Court of Gentiles was repurposed as a bazaar. All those Diaspora Jews coming back needed their Passover Lamb or whatever they could afford. Getting animals you carried all that way through the inspection process might require a bribe in the first place, so it was easier to just buy one of the pre-approved animals in the Bazaar of the Sons of Annas (Annas was one of the High Priests Rome had appointed during Jesus’ lifetime).

So Jesus comes into this bazaar in the Court of Gentiles, which was a cacophony of animals for sale along with the currency exchange booths, since pagan coins were not permitted for buying these animals, nor for offerings in the Temple. The whole thing was highly overpriced, and very unpopular with the vast majority of Jews, who were middle class at best. Indeed, Jesus was hardly the first prophet to disrupt the bazaar. It had been done before several times, and we have good reason to believe His complaints were hardly new.

John quotes from Psalm 69, wherein David mourns the persecution he received for putting God first above human concerns. David’s penitent acts served only to infuriate those who would prefer to ignore the Covenant when its demands were inconvenient. The bazaar filled the Court of Gentiles, preventing Gentile worshipers from getting anywhere near the Temple services. A fundamental element in the Covenant of Moses was the singular purpose of having Israel reveal Jehovah to the nations, but the Jewish leadership hated Gentiles, and despised their own peasantry almost as much.

So when Jesus started busting up the booths, the Temple Guard with the priests overseeing the bazaar asked where He got the authority to upset their money-making machinery. That was the point of their question — “Show us a miracle or we won’t listen to your complaints.” So Jesus gave them a cryptic answer. Now, being they were all either part of the Sanhedrin, or leaders in some synagogue somewhere (so they could keep an eye on things), they should have been acquainted with Hebrew symbolism. His reference to His body as “this temple” should have been obvious. They pretended to be obtuse about it, because their closet Hellenism (intellectual influences without the cultural trappings) taught them to be legalistic about words.

They pedantically cited how Herod’s renovation of the Temple took 46 years, so how could He raise it back up in three days? This was the kind of thing that caught in His disciple’s hearts, even if their minds weren’t yet up to the task. The “three days” came back to haunt them at His resurrection. John doesn’t record the rest of the encounter and it doesn’t matter. Jesus had gotten the Jewish leadership’s attention.

Then He proceeded to do some of those miracles they demanded from Him. John makes the rather odd comment that Jesus was careful not to let the enthusiasm of the crowds capture Him. We get the feeling He did His best to avoid having crowds follow Him around. No one had to tell Him how quickly this could turn into an ad hoc revolt that would only get people killed. He was teaching and proclaiming about repentance and the Day of the Lord in connection with these miracles, and everybody was pretty sure He was the Messiah. Having their heads filled with False Messianic Expectations, the masses were ready to see the current Jewish leadership thrown down, and Rome, too.

But Jesus had already firmly committed Himself to not being that kind of Messiah.

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