Let Nobody Stand between You and the Savior

Posted on July 1, 2021 by ehurst

The Law of Moses was never what most people think it was. Indeed, “law” is a very bad translation, given the implications of what it means in English. It’s far better to use the word “covenant.” Equally important is that the Covenant never meant what Judaism claims, either. The legalism of the Talmud bears only a superficial resemblance to the Covenant.

And there is no law in New Testament teaching, either. The Covenant was never hard and fast; even when written in stone, it was meant to guide, not restrain. It could never hold you back from sin; that required faith and spiritual birth. The Covenant was a representation, a manifestation, of God’s will for humanity. It was not in itself His divine will, as that cannot be put into words. The divine moral character of God is His will for us, and He still lives to breathes life into that will. Anytime you put that into words, it will never be the thing itself, only a representation of Him within a particular context. That’s the same with the New Testament.

Anytime you see or hear legalistic uses of the New Testament, put some distance between yourself and the people involved. It’s bad religion. It’s not necessarily bad people, but it’s bad religion. The New Testament message is the Person of Jesus Christ, and He is the final and ultimate revelation of the Father. The New Testament writing is about Christ, but is not Christ in itself. He is the New Testament; don’t confuse the documents with the Person.

When I discuss the gospel message with people outside the Covenant, I always emphasize the Lordship of Christ. It’s all about bowing the knee in humble repentance before Him. The people who can actually receive that message are likely to experience spiritual birth. Everyone else will need to hear it some more, but more importantly, they’ll need to see it.

You can probably find some discussion of something called “Lordship Salvation” as a particular theological point of debate. The nit-picking details are not important; it’s an artificial debate. You cannot make Jesus Lord without faith. His lordship is faith. But the primary message of the gospel is His lordship; faith is what God gives people in order to receive that message. Unless the Father awakens your faith, the message means nothing to you. You cannot separate lordship from faith, but you also cannot preach faith to people whose spirits remain dead.

It goes back to the very moment of the Fall. Satan himself chose to seize some of the glory for himself. The heart of the Fall is the temptation to seize divine glory for ourselves, to become our own deities through our reasoning capabilities. The restoration to Eden requires the death of our fleshly nature, and the fleshly nature is rebellion against divine revelation. If you do not bow the knee to Him, you cannot return to the Garden.

Faith does not come from us. It can arise in our souls only by the miracle of God’s touch. There is no way to put that in words, but we can depict something of how it works by using parables. In that sense, we end up having an argument with a lot of people who claim “salvation by faith.” What they are actually saying is that you must somehow generate faith from yourself, that faith can be born in the intellect.

But the human mind is fallen, and your fallen nature is incapable of faith. The intellect cannot be perfected; it can be redeemed only when it bows the knee to the heart of conviction. You cannot arrive at faith through reason. Anyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus (“Christian”) because it made sense to them is lying. I’m not saying that don’t belong to Jesus, but that they are deeply mistaken about what’s involved. They will always do a very bad job of following Him because they aren’t aware of their utter dependence on Him. They’ll keep coming up with their own answers.

“Saved by faith” means making Him Lord. The word “faith” means feudal commitment. The whole point of the Forbidden Fruit was making humans their own lords. When people are in control of any part of religion, it’s bad religion. Let nobody stand between you and the Savior.

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A Couple of Things

Posted on June 30, 2021 by ehurst

Reminder 1: Radix Fidem is not a religion. It is a meta-religion; it is a religious approach to forming a religion. Religion is the collection of human responses to faith. Faith itself is the awakening of a faculty within the soul, a sense of divine Presence that drives you to think and act. It informs the intellect, but is separate from the intellect. Religion is the intellect formulating a response to the divine Presence in the heart. Radix Fidem is the study of how we should each go about the business of thinking and acting on faith.

We have no expectation that we should come up with the same answer as anyone else. To the degree we overlap with someone else’s answers, we have fellowship. If we can get past certain bad mental reflexes, we could in theory create a faith community. However, there is a very realistic sense in which Radix Fidem is not sufficient by itself to be a religion.

So how do you propagate a meta-religion? I expect the core substance of Radix Fidem will grab hold of a lot of people who don’t share enough of my own answers to want to join a community with me. That’s normal; they should be the majority. People who embrace the meta can take it with them into a lot of settings I would not appreciate. My peculiar internal requirements are why I belong to no organized religion in the traditional sense. I’m doing my own thing here. But it’s the teaching and matching conduct that propagates the underlying assumptions.

The complex reality of what our world is like today indicates some things we might not want to admit. One of those is that there will never be a Radix Fidem organization. If there was, it would immediately morph into something else. The likelihood that anyone with leadership capability is going to embrace the core of Radix Fidem is minuscule. Meta-religion doesn’t lend itself to such a thing. Giving it a human organizational identity would kill it.

What we are doing with this approach to faith does not point to that. We are seeking to influence the drift of things, not the outcomes. We want to fold these core ideas into the resulting religion, because we cannot make it a religion in itself. There will forever be a tension between ideals and results. We need to accept that as the norm. You can share my religion, but if you don’t understand the distinction between the core concepts and the applications, you’ll never really understand how to share it. The idea is to liberate your faith from false restraints, to help you share your faith.

Do you get the feeling my apostleship is mostly a matter of seeking to enable loners? Then maybe you’ll understand my religion. Insofar as I’m trying to build a religion, that’s what it’s about. God calls a very large number of people who must follow a very isolated path, and they need a way to approach religion. But Radix Fidem is not restricted to that by any means. This thing should have an influence in how other religions work.

Reminder 2: Whatever it is I’m doing, it’s not libertarian. As part of my research, I’ve concluded that humanity is hard-wired to live in feudal communities — small tribal “nations” with a strong shared culture. Libertarian philosophy is intensely selfish. The only reason I appear to be close to the modern libertarian movement is simply the practical matter that a libertarian policy in the current context sets us free to work toward that feudal tribal idea.

Consider this: libertarians simply cannot grasp that taxation is in their best interest. To them, it’s government theft of resources that it didn’t earn. That’s flatly wrong, according to Scripture. Jesus said don’t bitch about taxes, “Render to Caesar…” The real issue is that what taxes ought to do is in all our best interests. Nobody is surprised that there is a handling cost in taking and then disbursing tax money. But waiting on people who own resources to recognize their own best interests is not going to happen. Libertarian philosophy assumes that mankind is not fallen.

Someone says, “I don’t have children. Why should I pay for schools?” Did you go to school yourself? You owe a debt to the system that gave you an education. Feel free to campaign for whatever you think might improve the education you pay for, but stop fighting the system that makes you pay.

Do you have no personal need for fast Internet? Yet the commercial benefit it brings to your local businesses makes it in your best interest to have cheap broadband access, so when the market offers no good answer, local municipal broadband is a good thing. Same goes with roads and other infrastructure. A ubiquitous postal service is in your best interest, even if you end up paying more for it than you actually use.

If you don’t give a damn about your local community, you are a moral reprobate. We have an awful lot of work to do to correct what kind of community we should have, but until we can get that work done, it’s a huge mistake to promote a philosophy of petty self-centered materialism — which is precisely what libertarianism is. God says there has to be a human government, and taxation is just a part of that.

I understand the academic definition of anarchy, but it never works out the way libertarians dream, because libertarians are utterly wrong about human nature. The reason we have a popular concept of anarchy as chaos and destruction is because that’s what happens every time anarchy starts taking hold. You cannot possibly educate humans to the point they don’t devour each other; the fallen nature cannot be educated out of us. Paul warned that, regardless how badly governments do things, God mandated that someone would bear the sword and govern. For the sake of the gospel message, it’s better than no government at all.

A good biblical government looks nothing like any of the political theories espoused in the West today. But that doesn’t mean we should reject the whole thing and promote anarchy. We should balance between seeking that biblical ideal on the small scale in our faith community, versus speaking the truth to the current situation in which we live. And for the most part, good tactics is mostly a matter of speaking the truth in small increments, addressing specific likelihoods of what the system might do.

Bonus Reminder: Until God Himself destroys the system wholesale — and He will, quite soon — our mission is to be very glad when just a single individual moves closer to our faith. And we can celebrate when that person actually embraces the whole Radix Fidem core assumptions. For this moment, small gains of one or two, here and there, are huge. The time is coming when the system will break down, and each of us will have to figure out how to proceed where we are. It may well be that we do so in isolation from the others in our small online community. So, the burden right now is to make sure you understand things.

Ask questions. Form a stronger frame of reference so that when disaster comes, the internal preparation trumps any lack of contextual resources. Learn to stand in the Day of Testing.

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Odds and Ends 09

Posted on June 29, 2021 by ehurst

Today they are cleaning the blood off the streets in places like Chicago, Baltimore, etc. It’s not entirely new, but it’s the scale of things that speaks to us. This is how it will go, I believe.

I’m not expecting a formal announcement. The chaos will ramp up over a period of time. The next American civil war will be running easily a year before the average citizen recognizes it for what it is. The people who are most threatened by the current ruling regime are the ones who will deny it the longest.

This isn’t going to be neat and clean anywhere, anyhow. The US will stumble into conflict. The resulting decentralization will be ad hoc. Among those who are saddled with making the decisions, there are very few minds currently working out any kind of planning about this. Just a few state leaders are aware of the implications of what they see.

——

For all their common expertise and vast experience with bureaucracy, the VA medical system cooperates with other providers very poorly. All the other civilian systems together are more integrated with each other better than the VA is with any outside services.

VA Orthopedics ordered an MRI of my knee. The VA has only one machine working, and I couldn’t get in for a scan before my next Ortho appointment in October. So the folks in booking offered to send me out to a third party. That was then passed through another office, which then passed it to some contract agency that barely works with any of the other medical providers, and we have dozens in the OKC Metro. Still, they eventually made the appointment for me.

Then they told me the wrong place to go. It turns out they handed it off to a medical provider that has been buying up facilities left and right (Saint Anthony), and they are constantly moving stuff around. I ended up driving almost 20 miles to a facility with an MRI machine up near Edmond. Then I drove 10 miles to another place near Downtown OKC to pick up the images, because there was no direct way they could get them to the VA. They can’t even identify the doctors working inside the VA hospital.

Then I hand carried them to my clinic within the VA system. It was like a workout just doing all that hustling around trying to find the right place for each step in this process. It ate up half of my day. The medical system will end up killing more people through simple inefficiency than it saves.

——

Yesterday’s workout was very interesting. On the bike path heading to the park, there were three crews cutting tree limbs that had grown too close to the utility lines on poles. The first was not too hard to avoid; they had small traffic cones suggesting I simply go around them on the grass. Doing so was no challenge at all. The second crew didn’t have cones, but when I started off the pavement, I hit a crater hidden in the tall grass. The bike flipped end-over, which means I vaulted over the handlebars. I’d given anything to see myself doing that on video.

No harm done; I landed in the soft grass. The biggest problem was that my long-tailed t-shirt was caught on the handlebar, which was partly under me, so I was a little trapped. One of the crewmen got it out from under me and upright. I got a little muddy, but no big deal. The senior crewman had this look on his face like he was worried I’d make a scene or sue. I just smiled and walked my bike around the cut limbs on the ground and continued on my way. It had no effect on my workout.

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Oppressive Technology

Posted on June 28, 2021 by ehurst

I’m laughing:

If you’re curious how entrenched older Windows versions are, we can get a good estimate by visiting a dataset maintained by the United States Government Digital Analytics Program. This dataset contains a rolling summary of visitors to US government websites and the operating systems their browsers report that they use.

Let’s kick-off with the most bizarre observation: 15 users who accessed government sites are still using Windows 3.1! That’s a 30-year-old operating system. 3,255, 5,131, and 1,088 accesses came from people who are still using Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME, respectively. Hello? The 1990s called and would like its operating systems back.

It’s not that I’m so surprised that people still run older versions of Windows. I’m surprised they are still able to access the Internet, apparently without having serious problems. With all the horror stories out there, you’d think there was no way these systems could last more than a minute on the Net. It shows that the propaganda about the threat factor is way off.

From less publicized information, I’ve learned that you could run whatever you like from behind a good, solid firewall, and likely do just fine. Some ISPs will even play that roll for you. (Much as I hate AOL, I have to admit their “walled garden” approach actually works to protect ancient Windows machines.) Part of the issue is that the bad guys aren’t interested in machines that can’t handle a hefty workload, to include a very high network output. There’s no money in cracking WinXP or earlier. It’s no longer about bragging rights among the other hackers; computer crimes are all about the money. A great deal of malware simply won’t run on older versions of Windows.

Still, the big story in that linked article is that Microsoft has decided once again to zombie millions (perhaps hundreds of millions) of computers by refusing to let their latest and greatest run on some older hardware. Except, this time the upgrade to Win11 is not even a real upgrade. It’s just Win10 with a different face — a very slightly different face, at that. Given the economic situation, this could simply fail massively, in that the vast majority of computer users, both private and corporate, cannot afford new machines.

Worse, no one at Microsoft can give a straight answer. Even their software package for assessing the hardware isn’t accurate, according to reports from people who track the ever-changing story told by Microsoft. Thus, a huge number of machines running Win10 right soon will be put on zombie status, with support ending in 2025. You’ll be very surprised how quickly that date arrives. Then again, it is quite likely the date will be extended, rather like the way it played out over WinXP.

Also, a great many machine owners cannot upgrade because they are running some essential software and hardware that simply is not supported on newer versions of Windows. Certifications mean a lot in highly regulated industries. So a great many XP machines are running in ATMs, for example. The banking and medical industries are notorious for running older versions of Windows on their peculiar machines. They bought good hardware and took care of it, and it’s now integrated into an entire ecosystem within the organization. The investments were big enough at the time to make it tough to justify buying an entirely new system now; the disruption would be too great, threatening human life in some cases.

I give thanks my own situation isn’t like that. Virtually everything I do requires only some kind of computing device that can access online services. If I had to, I could do it all from a smartphone the way so many people do now. However, I am far more comfortable using something bigger and more accommodating to my work habits. I had hopes that Microsoft would keep their promise that Win10 would be the last version of Windows. I’ve given up on their OS, though I still have strong confidence in their Office and online services.

I finally got PCLinuxOS working on my laptop. Every version of Ubuntu (actually Xubuntu and Kubuntu) I tried on it failed to boot consistently. Indeed, this past Sunday morning it steadfastly refused to boot into the OS at all. I lost a little bit of writing that was copied nowhere else, but nothing I intended to share. I would have been content with the Ubuntu universe, but there are too many bad corporate decisions along their path. I no longer enjoy checking out alternatives; I would much rather pick something and stay with it. For now, it’s starting to look like PCLinuxOS is where I’ll migrate for that.

My reasons for that choice probably won’t matter to you. But for the curious, it includes critical issues like not having to worry about systemd locking me out of control decisions on how things work. PCLinuxOS doesn’t have that. Most of the software I like to use is included in the standard repositories, and it seems like the management of PCLinuxOS aren’t doctrinaire about using stuff that isn’t totally Open Source. I don’t care about that, either. I just want to use my computer the way I like to use it.

There are a few other side benefits, like far better font rendering, that the system is zippy fast on slow hardware, and so forth. The flaws are minor, so far; I can live with it. To be honest, once I got used to MS-DOS and impact printers, I could have kept using that system forever. That simply isn’t a viable option for me, now. Technology has been harnessed to oppression, not to human need.

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New Testament Doctrine: Matthew 4:1-11

Posted on June 26, 2021 by ehurst

The only mystery here is what each of these three temptations represent. There are at least two levels for answering this question. The first level is the background story of False Messianic Expectations. One of my professors in college was a pioneer in this field of study. The source material is difficult to find these days because it’s related to the formation of the Talmud, something Jewish scholars have tried to keep away from Gentile eyes.

In essence, each of these three temptations was the question of just what kind of Messiah Jesus would be. Would He cultivate the existing Jewish leadership by playing up to their perverted expectations, and thus force them to recognize Him as Messiah (a false Messiah), or would He stick with the actual prophesies in Scripture and obey His Father?

The second level is to recognize a pattern to these temptations, and how that pattern fits in with teachings elsewhere in Scripture. It shows up first in Genesis 3:1-6. In particular, Eve was tempted to eat the Forbidden Fruit by three issues: It would fill the stomach like food, was alluring to the eyes, and could make one an expert “like God, deciding what is good and evil” (human boasting to be as capable as God).

The same pattern shows up in 1 John 2:15-17. Those same three temptations are declared as the root of fleshly desires: Lust of the Flesh, Lust of the Eyes and the Boastful Pride of Life. Thus, the Temptations in the Wilderness are the Devil using the basic trio of human fleshly desires to trick Jesus into becoming precisely the kind of false Messiah the Jewish leadership were expecting. It was a list of demands they made to anyone claiming to be the Messiah, and there had been several candidates.

Right after His baptism ritual at the hands of John the Baptist, Jesus was led by His own convictions to face this temptation in His cousin’s old stomping grounds, that rocky desert area on the northwest side of the Dead Sea. He fasted for “forty days” — a common Hebrew expression meaning more than a month, and seldom marking days with any numerical precision. We know today that this was long enough to thoroughly cleanse the body of all toxins, and it’s about this time when the appetite, which goes to sleep after three days, reawakens with a vengeance.

So Satan arrives at that moment and suggests that Jesus could easily assuage His hunger (Lust of the Flesh). Those flat round rocks looked just like the standard pita bread eaten by everyone in the Ancient Near East. The idea was to play up to the fleshly appetites of Jewish leaders in their insistence that the Messiah would turn stones into bread, among other things, to provide for the material comforts of His nation. This particular materialistic expectation went on and on about how the wealth of the world would be transported to Jerusalem at the Messiah’s command.

Jesus’ answer was that the flesh didn’t get a vote in the matter. Everything in human existence must be surrendered to divine revelation. Adam and Eve could have eaten anything in the Garden they wanted except that one fruit, but the Forbidden Tree symbolized the choice to abandon God’s boundaries and to reason out one’s own. We note in passing Jesus used a bit of Hebrew humor to respond, emphasizing that the human mouth was the symbolic problem. It’s not what you put in your mouth that should guide your decisions, but what comes from God’s mouth that directs your path. The food of the soul is the Word of God.

Next, Satan transports Him to the Pinnacle of the Temple, which we believe is that southeast corner of the Temple Plaza, a very high terrace roughly 70 feet (21.3m) above the sloped hillside on which this corner stood. Satan suggested that Jesus jump off so that angels could catch Him and bring Him down safely. And well those angels would, if Jesus commanded it for some valid reason. However, Satan was trying to bring about a spectacle (Lust of the Eyes) that would force the Jewish leadership to acknowledge His divinity. The verse from Psalm 91 that Satan quotes was one the scholars had specifically pointed out, and had said their kind of Messiah would jump off the Pinnacle to announce Himself to them.

Jesus responded by saying that we should not fling a challenge in God’s face, as if His failure to protect us would be an embarrassment to Him and His glory. This was a particular aspect of Talmudic teaching, that by Jewish logic, God was obliged to do certain things to protect His interests on the earth.

It doesn’t matter what high mountain Satan used for his final attempt to derail Jesus’ ministry. The point is that Satan could point out several kingdoms surrounding Judea from several different peaks in that area, and some lands quite far distant, and would have used this as the starting point to cast a false vision of ruling the world (Boastful Pride of Life). It was not a divine rule he offered, but a very human political reign, one that would have eventually ended when God was ready, not when Satan falsely promised. This was by far the most obvious claim Jewish leaders made, that the Messiah would restore their Jewish political independence. More, the False Messianic Expectations would require Him to command the whole Gentile world to come and surrender themselves as slaves to the Jewish people, so that each Jewish household would have its own army of slaves.

All Jesus had to do was swear feudal allegiance to Satan. To this Jesus answered with the most obvious: There is only one God of Creation. We are to swear loyalty to Him and no other. This answer jumps two or three levels above what Satan was talking about at that moment. It’s not that Satan had no control over human politics; it’s that his control was highly limited. Satan served God’s whims when it comes to humanity outside the Covenant, and even more constrained within the Covenant. He was just the agent of temptation and destruction, and nothing he offered was long term, much less eternal.

Nothing good came from eating the Forbidden Fruit. All Satan’s promises were half-truths, at best. And that hasn’t changed since Eden. Satan had managed to make the Jews materialistic enough to reason that God’s eternal promises could only mean human comfort in this fallen realm of existence. The real issue here is that Jesus refused to support that false doctrine. He planned to argue against it from the ancient Hebrew mystical point of view on which the Scripture stands.

Try to keep this teaching in the back of your mind as we move forward with the series. This fundamental concept will come back again and again.

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A Long Way to Go

Posted on June 26, 2021 by ehurst

Every time I write something, my spirit cries out to God, “Give me the words! Don’t let me get in Your way, O Lord, but help me to straighten and smooth the path so You can touch hearts.”

There’s little room for criticism of people who don’t understand. God knows, I started off damnably ignorant. And I’ve been known to come across all wrong to some folks, which is why I pray for the words. The room for criticism comes when people get the divine truth and reject it. It’s always because they serve some other god, and maybe several.

While the Hebrew Scriptures personify the false deities of men, in our culture there are plenty of impersonal deities. This is the curse of Hellenism and Western Civilization. It’s the reason America has a vast pantheon of countless deities. The notion that the universe is composed of non-living matter has resulted in the death of God in our consciousness. It moves God into the sphere of things spooky, superstitious and inexplicable, which in turn means that there is nothing you can do about Him, that you cannot engage Him directly and personally.

God explained Himself quite eloquently, and He is very much alive today, calling us back to Him. He said that He fully expected people to approach Him personally and individually, to get to know Him and love Him as Sovereign. Even talking like that often fails to register in the souls of many, who unconsciously discount such language as mere lyricism. Well, I’m here to declare that you can know what God thinks about things in this world, and He has commanded that you do so.

Doing so means a massive internal battle to displace the American outlook with the ancient Hebraic outlook. You’ll spend your whole life engaged in that task and are wholly unlikely to ever arrive. But it’s not the destination that matters so much as God’s command that we start down the path. It happens to be the path that Jesus taught. The only way to understand Jesus is to get inside the ancient Hebrew mind. That’s the mind God created as the vehicle for revelation; it’s the mind necessary to understand revelation.

So the reason I pick on the issue of pedophilia is that it represents one of the most powerful and sacred idols in America: the idolatry of childhood. It’s a nasty demon you worship there, one that destroys like few other.

Go to any active evangelical church, and you are likely to find there people who have risen out of all kinds of sin. There are former thieves, alcoholics, dope users and dealers, even former murderers. You’ll sit next to them and fellowship with them, even bring your kids around them. We even have a whole range of sexual perverts whom God has famously healed. But let one person mention they once suffered from pedophilia and the whole picture changes. Notice how it’s no longer the grace of God that is sacred, but some pagan idol that intrudes.

Can God heal pedophiles? Can God heal the victims of child molestation? Not in America.

The reason victims of child molestation struggle for the rest of their lives is that American society offers no hope for them. In their minds, the child is now eternally damaged goods. They have lost their one hope of kneeling at the altar of the false god of childhood. As every pagan worshiper knows, the demon god of childhood won’t allow children with sexual experience to enter the shrine. Instead, that demon declares the child forever broken. Such children know they are outcasts; they can grasp internally that they are damaged goods. Mommy and Daddy and all the other adults are so crestfallen at the unspeakable loss of all future hope. You poor, crippled baby. At least, that’s how our American society acts, treating physical disabilities with extravagant affirmations and accommodations, but not having been molested.

The clinical literature showing how some children have recovered and adjusted to having been molested, and have gone on with childhood and the rest of their lives is forbidden knowledge.

So it stands to reason that a genuine American consciousness would be ready to slay child molesters with a very ungodly vehemence. This, when it is American society itself that deeply inflames the perverse desire for sex with children. Have you not seen how kids are being sexualized in advertising? Lust for them and buy the stuff, just so long as you don’t actually touch them. It has to be more thrilling than sex with adults, because it’s so terribly sacred. That’s the nature of perversion: It twists things around backwards. It’s the other edge of the same sword of idolatry. With one edge you elevate something unjustly, and with the other edge you build a desire for despoiling that thing.

There are bad things happening to us all the time. If we follow the Hebraic outlook on life, we take it in stride as the hand of God. There is no internal argument over whether He did it to us Himself, or simply allowed it to happen. Rather, we don’t hold this life as sacred (another idol of the West). We expect a shitty existence because this is not the world God made for us. Rather, we share in the blame for rejecting His world in Eden based on His revelation, and this is what we get instead, and it’s nasty. Bad things are supposed to happen to us. It’s programmed in, and only miracles can get you out of some of it.

And the real miracle is that He reveals the strength to handle it, to recover and go on with serving Him so that our response to all the bad stuff shines the light of His glory. And somehow we are supposed to believe that child molestation is not simply a part of this nasty background, that somehow it is the one sin that cannot be forgiven? Do you think Jesus didn’t die on the Cross of pedophiles, too? He described the unforgivable sin as something else entirely.

Pedophilia doesn’t figure in the Bible narrative because it wasn’t among the sins peculiar to the Hebrew people. Paul ran across it; there were pagan cults among the Gentiles that included child molestation as a part of their rituals. It was quite rare. Paul lumps it into a lot of other stuff, because by itself it wasn’t such a big deal. It was never in his mind a singular kind of sin any worse than all the other sexual perversions common to pagan Gentiles. His attitude was Hebrew, just like that of Jesus.

That teaching, “Suffer the little children to come unto me…” does not make children more sacred than His followers. Don’t pervert the teaching. It teaches adults to stop thinking they have any particular advantage, but rather, they have a ways to go to find the proper starting point to begin following Christ. Children are in some ways closer to the staring point, primarily because they don’t cling to a mass of demands from God.

Christians who choke on pedophilia have a very, very long way to go to claim they are following Christ.

Now, let’s have a corrective. If you survey the Covenant of Moses, you’ll find that children were expected to recover from the wounds of life. It wasn’t an iron demand, but a nurturing atmosphere that taught them not to take themselves too seriously. The ancient Hebrew consciousness was that the world was an ugly place and bad things happen. But as long as you are alive, God has a purpose for you. Find it, embrace it, and live it to the hilt.

So if a child was molested, that would be just another bad thing that happens in an evil world. For the perpetrator, they would be handled according to the damage done, not to the child or the parents, but to the Covenant blessings of shalom. They would not be killed, except in the most egregious and shocking violations of other parts of the Covenant. For example, if it was homosexual, then that is the primary threat, not the molestation of a child. Homosexuality was a capital crime.

For normal heterosexual child molestation, the perpetrator could be forced to pay a sum of money to the parents. The kid can still grow up and get married. If it’s a girl child, it depends on her age whether the perpetrator becomes responsible for lifetime support. Notice how the Hebrew culture did not worship sexual freedom any more than it worshiped childhood. In their minds, it was the fundamental nature of a stable and functional society — particularly one that served to reveal God’s personal moral nature — to give men more sexual freedom than women (though it was hardly carte blanche). We simply don’t have room to get into that here. The point is that the single greatest concern was the stability of the social structure under the Covenant.

And the other point is that Americans worship not only childhood, but sexual freedom of choice. Both of those are nasty demon gods. Again, American Christians have a very long way to go to approach the biblical model of Jesus.

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The Fields are Bountiful

Posted on June 25, 2021 by ehurst

My first notice was in my convictions, as it should be. The Lord moved me to get treatment for my left knee pain. It takes time for human government bureaucracy to move, so it was a waiting game. I was going to need more use of that knee. I had all these thrilling visions of doing stuff that I have always loved to do — driving out to remote areas of Oklahoma, maybe hiking some, riding my bike more, etc. The vision half of that was all me; it was my personal manifestation of hope. The hope part was from God, but how I interpreted that was just a matter of my own wishes.

It’s not that God isn’t going to let me do those things, but they weren’t the primary reason for a push to get into better shape. The need to restore some of the fitness I’ve had in the past was based on something much bigger than my personal motivations. At the time, I wasn’t aware of that, but it got me on the path God required.

Now I’m starting to see stuff that gives those urges a better definition. It’s not like I can list a bunch of stories with links for intellectual proof, but I’m sensing that the moral tensions in the world are rising dramatically. The demons were set loose some time ago, and their deeds of darkness are starting to bear fruit.

People are going nuts, committing bizarre acts of violence. Political figures are making the most egregious, outrageous demands. People everywhere are abusing what little authority they might hold to make others miserable. None of this is particularly new, but the scale of it is what draws my attention.

Now is the time to get ready, specifically in terms of being ready for physical stresses. To be honest, I really doubt I’ll see very much physical action for a while yet, but there’s a powerful sense of need to engage that old tactical awareness, and as much physical capacity as I can build up for something yet unseen. There’s going to be a lot of work to do, and it will happen under very sub-optimal conditions. I need to be ready to respond regardless of the context.

It’s easy to let things drift, to start feeling old and tired. When the flesh fails, it bleeds over into everything else. As Paul noted, I need to shed the excess weight and lethargy so I can run the race course set before me. I may be retired by official US government reckoning, but there will be no retirement from the mission God gave me. It’s just getting wound up. I need the physical resources to stand and deliver the Word at any moment. This can’t be done on autopilot.

So I’m working out six days per week. I’ve folded my physical therapy exercises into my routine. I won’t tell you that my knees don’t hurt, but that it’s now manageable. I can push to higher limits in order to harvest a stronger response from my aging body. Everything I do is aimed at supporting the need to respond to moral crisis, to be ready to breathe life into the Scripture so that it grabs people.

I suspect a good many of you have similar urges. I sincerely hope so. There aren’t many of us right now, and the harvest will be massive.

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Don’t Kill It

Posted on June 24, 2021 by ehurst

Another thing that’s been cooking in the back of my soul is that not everything children do is childish. On the one hand there is that verse about putting away childish things, but then Jesus also said regarding children, “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

A peculiar mistake American women make is that men being men means they are childish. This, of course, rises from the feminist spite for men. And this, in turn, rises from the Western traditions rooted in our Germanic heritage that insists women are the roots of civilization, more valuable to society than men. This is a pagan notion, not at all consistent with the Hebrew assumptions about reality.

The Bible states flatly that Eve didn’t comprehend the moral threat of eating the Forbidden Fruit. Paul goes on to clarify that Eve was deceived because of her own created feminine nature. And while men can be morally deceived, it’s a matter of their fallen nature, not their created nature.

The accusation that a man is being childish almost always comes in the context of a man who doesn’t bow the knee to the variable breezes of her feelings at any given moment. She works from the assumption that, whatever she feels at any given moment, everyone around her must also feel. She quickly forgets that her childlike girlish instincts can also flair up.

There are some people in this world specially gifted with a talent for teaching children. They remember being a child and empathize with that huge mountain of understanding children have to climb. They remember not knowing things, and how they learned. These adults are capable of getting inside a child’s world and guiding them to security and competence. Unfortunately, this is not a part of what the system looks for when selecting people to become school teachers.

That’s in part because there are flaws that come in the same package, and those flaws frighten women in particular who lack that gift. Women who cannot understand children can still mother well enough, but they refuse to take advantage of the gifts God gives to men and women who do understand children. They associate that package with danger because they know bad things can happen, but “bad things” as measured only by people who don’t understand children.

It’s a vicious circle. Our society rejects the good things children, and childlike adults, do because it’s economically inefficient. So when that behavior shows up in adults, it’s a really big annoyance to those who lack the vitality of a wonder and joy about the world. It just so happens that virtually everyone who steers society lacks that wonder and joy, in part because children don’t want to steer society that way. The desire to steer society through rules is anti-child, anti-joy and anti-wonder. Joy and wonder take time, and greedy people think time is like money. They can’t stop and smell the flowers.

Thus, those who are sensitive to joy and wonder as children get damaged by TPTB. They come into adulthood with a lot of unfinished business. Do you not realize that the vast majority of pedophiles are adults with a lot of unfinished business like that? If you create a social structure that hates joy and wonder, you cannot avoid having pedophiles. Our society permits all kinds of perversion. If you create a structure that embraces perversion without understanding its implications, it is tantamount to embracing all perversions.

Let’s get one thing straight: God is not nearly as worried about child molestation as Americans are. With average Americans it’s the crime of the millennium, but in God’s eyes it’s actually a rather small problem built into the fallen world.

Meanwhile, the same joyless powers-that-be have this false notion that we cannot help pedophiles. They have zero faith in God to heal the hurts that create pedophilia in the first place. Go ahead, let a recovered pedophile testify to God’s grace in any church. Watch how folks will drag their children to the far side of the room from that person. Their paranoia is precisely the kind of thing that provokes children to curiosity about such people. Children ask, “Why is he/she so dangerous?” And it’s the healed pedophile’s sensitivity about children what will draw children.

It’s not the presence of children that makes a pedophile desire sex with them. It’s the presence of sexual perversion, the winking and laughing about it, that awakens their own perverse desires. If you build a society that is too embarrassed at its own perversions to examine the underlying psychosis of pedophilia, the problem never goes away. Society itself needs to be healed.

Hebrew society took human sexual desire, with perversions, for granted. It didn’t demonize them. It was just a natural result of the Fall. Nor can you get from the Bible the obsession that sex is only for procreation. Sex should be play; thus, the KJV refers to Isaac “sporting” with Rebecca, which betrayed the nature of their relationship. Children are actually a joyful side effect, not some onerous duty. The Bible frankly leaves the door wide open for joyful exploration of sexual experience — within the safe boundaries of lifetime covenant commitment.

Women, if you don’t embrace the childlike joy of your husband, you are pushing him to sexual wandering, to include pedophilia. If you can’t enjoy the childlike moments we all should have — the joy and wonder about things — then you cannot fill his needs. If you cannot be the gal he needs, stay out of his life in the first place. He will be frustrated and hate you for being a chain and ball, instead of being his partner in facing the world. If you must dominate, and cannot surrender yourself to responsiveness, you have already killed the relationship.

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God Doesn’t Play Games

Posted on June 23, 2021 by ehurst

Something has been cooking in the back of my soul for a couple of days. I expect it will spin off several posts, but the first one is this: I’m living in a miracle marriage.

No one has to tell me how bad it can be. Years serving in both formal and informal pastoral roles has shown me any number of unhealthy marriages. To this day, there are a handful that I still find incomprehensible. How do people live like that?

Then I stumbled across the men’s Red Pill movement. Finally, someone was able to articulate a lot of what I sensed but couldn’t formulate. The single biggest revelation was the use of Game Theory in social sciences. It’s by far more scientific than almost every clinical study I’ve seen, not to mention a lot of theoretical stuff. It allowed me to organize and describe both male and female human nature.

But the one thing that has always disappointed me? Virtually nobody writes about the Red Pill revelations as it tends to reflect ancient Hebrew culture. It’s not that the Red Pill lore is biblical, but that it tends to parallel what Scripture says; the assumptions tend to overlap. What to do with what we learn from it is where I take issue with most of the Red Pill stuff out there.

On Jack’s blog I’ve become pretty alienated from the rest of those who comment. All I had to do was assert that faith and a sense of calling was sufficient to answer all the woes of marital relations. It might still be work, but God’s power to overcome fallen human sinful tendencies is sufficient to answer all our needs. He still does miracles today.

I’ll even grant that some people are destined for a bad marriage as part of God’s ineffable planning in some of His servants’ lives. Recall Hosea, whom God commanded to marry a whore. But then look at how Hosea’s faith made it possible for him to handle all the sorrows that arose from that.

The fixation of so very many “Christians” on the outcomes is a major flaw in religion. The Bible says be faithful and let God steer the ship. Stop trying to create rules by which you secure some particular outcome, and somehow find Bible verses that appear to support this or that man-made rule. The issue is not the outcomes, but the faith that carries you through it.

My calling and my radical faith commitment in my youth went a long way to setting me up for such a fine marriage. Most of the men commenting on Jack’s blog don’t even believe it’s possible to have what I have. It’s not that Veloyce is so very perfect (and Lord knows I’m not) but that we share a faith commitment. We both bring to this marriage a sense of divine calling, something that sees us through the situations arising from a very imperfect world.

Let me reiterate: It’s commitment and calling, two edges of the same sword. The majority seem to ignore this, even when Jack bluntly echoes what I say about it. Rules will provide some useful guidelines, but they can’t be treated as on par with Biblical Law. They are not; they are most certainly man-made.

I don’t even dare talk about the heart-led way with those guys on Jack’s blog. They would choke; they’ve already ridiculed me enough on the issue of faith and calling. That’s the real issue between Veloyce and I — we were both heart-led before we even knew what to call it. We both came into this marriage able to commune with nature. We could hear the songs of Creation, the music of the natural flora and fauna around us. We could sense things our minds could never understand.

I refuse to accept the notion that this isn’t for everyone. I remain utterly certain it’s built into human nature itself. I’ve met tens of thousands of Christians in my life, and very few can even swallow the idea. Oddly, I’ve run into a substantial number of pagans who rely on it. This is part of what gives shape to my conviction that it’s a common human capacity.

My convictions tell me that this teaching is going to open new doors as tribulation grows around us. My convictions also tell me, by the way, that Ben Davidson and Suspicious Observers are essentially correct but that God isn’t going do another Noahic destruction of the human race anytime soon.

I’m utterly convinced the Lord wants this message to go forth, and that we won’t be wasting our breath telling others. Yes, plenty of death and destruction are coming, but this is not the end of everything we know. God isn’t playing games with those of us He called to teach the Radix Fidem way. Some of us shall live to see this message spread to a substantial number of souls.

This is our answer to life, the universe and everything.

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Random Photos 10

Posted on June 22, 2021 by ehurst

Today’s ride took me north along Midwest Boulevard and more or less along the Canadian River. I noticed last week the signs at the major section line corners north and south of the Canadian River saying the road was closed, bridge out. This time I was curious enough to take a look. The first image shows the concrete barriers across the road at the Crutcho Creek bridge.

The barriers left a gap that my bike could easily pass through, and after looking it over, the only damage to the bridge I could see was this guardrail. Given how the lawyers in these parts think, I’m not surprised they would close off the road for something this minor. Granted, it’s possible they are planning significant repairs or even replacement, but there’s nothing to indicate either way.

A fellow was sitting in a pickup near the southern barrier and told me he was there to make his weekly check on the railroad signal box. He told me that the barriers had been there for at last two weeks, but that no work at all had been done since they went up. That’s also typical for these parts. Try to imagine how the greenery growing on the edge of the road will encroach significantly without the traffic coming along to rip it off at the edge of the corridor. Already there are vines reaching out some three feet onto the pavement in places.

While I’m not equipped to do much of anything about that, I will note that I’ve been carrying my hand-loppers already the past few weeks, clipping back greenery in all the usual places I ride. I’ve already spent one day with bigger cutting tools at one spot. Time for some more serious cutting in other places.

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