The Divine Tolerance of Church

Posted on July 23, 2021 by ehurst

This is so simple, and yet millions of professing Christians don’t see it. Ask any of them what church is really all about and you’ll get a lot of answers. One of the most common answers will be some mixture of getting more bodies, budgets and buildings. That’s fine for a business, but it’s not what the New Testament says churches do.

The single greatest mission objective for churches is learning to live with each other.

Go ahead; read that again. The whole point of a church family is to love and care for people for whom you might have no human reason to even notice in the first place. This is the core of what a church is in the New Testament. It’s people learning to accept each other as God’s gift.

Yes, we must have boundaries, but the boundaries point to the pragmatic issue of working together. It’s not the matter of what you accomplish, but the a matter of communion and fellowship. It’s whether you can learn to put up with each other in day to day living. So right away, we realize that coming to a common meeting place for an hour or two each week does not promote this goal. This isn’t a social club, but a family household. You should be in each other’s armpits every day, just like a real family living in one household.

So, all that building effort to construct facilities specifically designed for short hours of purposeful occupation and long periods empty is very much not a New Testament plan. The building plan should be housing and care facilities, so that you can all be together. It’s not communism and it’s not encouraging lazy bums to sponge off the system. It’s a family whose primary business is making a life together as family. It’s the ongoing mission of putting out fires and solving conflicts. That’s the primary function of a church — just being together.

Thus, the miniature culture that grows within a church fellowship should be based on the idea of being able to tolerate each other. Your membership should reflect an invitation for folks you can stand to be around. This is where that business of predestination comes into play. Way too many churches are seeking to reach a particular target demographic, a specific audience for corporate planning. They build programs for psychological conversion, and pretend it’s what “spiritual birth” means. In the Bible, it says flatly that God chooses whom they will be; your mission is to make a life for them and with them. All the underlying, unspoken planning behind church growth strategies has been based on the flesh, not on the Spirit.

Get what I’m suggesting here: There’s a difference between building a corporate entertainment franchise, and building a tribe that can live together. There will be some superficial similarities at times between those two conflicting visions, but the fundamental choices are different. The kind of rules you build for the two will be entirely different. You aren’t inviting only folks with a nice middle-class income, and trying to teach some artificial accommodating regimen for the sake of keeping a paying audience. You are inviting people as the true treasure of faith on this earth.

So you’re doing two things at once. First, you are fully aware that a significant portion of folks coming into the church won’t stay that long. They’ll become aware of moral and spiritual patterns, and at some point based on that, become aware that they are called to another work somewhere else. Second, you’ll develop a core of permanent family members who will fully embrace the shared identity of faith. They won’t leave until God drags them away.

But the work itself is building a tribe with an otherworldly orientation. The primary interest is in making the faith of each member stronger. A primary manifestation of faith is loving and caring for someone who needs your help, and learning to accept the gifts and talents they supply. The fundamental assumption is that what faith demands in this life is not something any one person can do alone. It always requires the supporting network of weirdos you would likely never choose to be with for any human reason. You build your activities based on what your members can do, not artificially construct a military unit with pre-determined specialties, for which you then recruit folks to match your design. You take what God brings in the door and figure out what He intends you to do based on what you have in the people.

This is why I keep saying that, as elder of a virtual parish, a primary requirement for membership is not that you buy everything I say, but that you can understand where it comes from and can tolerate it provisionally, so that we can continue being a community. Maybe some day it will be your turn to tell it like you believe it, and then you’ll ask folks to tolerate you.

We don’t have to think alike, but we do seek common ground. We draw the boundaries of what we can tolerate based on a vision of unity that is not what humans can do, but what God Himself can do in us. We don’t have to get much done, in human terms, but we do have to stick together and defend each other from demonic interference. God says we need each other, so get rid of the idea of doing it alone. Recognize when a brother or sister does something good for the body better than you do it, and encourage them to find their own blessings that way. Make room for each other. Don’t plan what kind of people you need; plan to accommodate whatever God brings through the door.

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Stop the Brother against Brother Stuff

Posted on July 22, 2021 by ehurst

Home should be the one place where you can be yourself. It’s the place where you are protected from anyone else’s impertinent judgments about you. It’s the one place where following your convictions is always right. It’s supposed to be the domain God as feudal Sovereign has granted you, so that you can carry out His will unhindered by outside forces.

And church should be the place where your domain merges with others of like faith who will reinforce your mission and calling. The phrase “of like faith” needs to be reinterpreted here: It means you stand with others who hold the same total commitment to Christ as Lord. It’s the place where Jesus rules unhindered as the Ancient Near Eastern feudal Master, and we His adopted family. That’s where all covenants in the Bible point.

If there is a distinctly Christian Red Pill lore, then it’s really not so much a matter of having ideal marriages, but of being more perfect men. We should view marriages as a result, something God grants for His own purposes. We should strive, as part of the gospel mission, to have better relations with everyone who wants them, and romance is just a special category within the matrix of how we live the Word with others.

Building a godly community is not restricted to breeding one from scratch. The Covenant of Christ is not one of human birth, but of spiritual adoption. We are all imported, and the issue is spiritual birth, spiritual DNA. Our children still have to have this, and it’s not automatic. We should raise them as best we can, but the primary mission is finding hearts open to the gospel, whether inside or outside the home.

Nor is it merely a matter of claiming spiritual birth. The biggest single element is holding a sense of calling together. We haven’t done good work establishing a proper understanding of boundaries. Church History is a very ugly tale of including and excluding people on all the wrong grounds. On Judgment Day, we should all stand ashamed that we failed to understand how one person’s logical analysis of what it means to obey the Lord is for them alone, not a rule of faith by which to judge others. That was never part of any biblical covenant.

The whole thing is rather soft, and should arise from mere practical matters. Can you tolerate each other? How hard, and how soft, can the individual boundaries of divine calling be, and at what points do we harden or soften them for the sake of the gospel? We don’t have a Church History of seeking the truth without making it a cerebral task, and the very nature of the Fall itself is trusting human capabilities to establish right and wrong. We mistake our human boundaries as coming from God. We very much need to work on that.

But that’s a huge task, and I mention it only to make it obvious just how much work we have ahead of us. One of the first and most obvious ways we can tell the world about our Savior is how we defend each other. One particular place where this has failed is how Christian Red Pill men don’t pull together in a tribal manner, as the Bible teaches.

Jack notes how most church guys attack each other in support of feminist idolatry. If we do not band together to uphold a biblical standard of manhood, then we cannot expect anyone else to respect our boundaries, either. The strength of the Body of Christ is our moral unity, not our theological unity. It’s not merely a matter of how we do or don’t impress the church ladies, or anyone else. It’s a matter of how we uphold each other as men, because God said in His Word that we are the foundation of His reign on this earth.

Jack particularly points out how the primary problem of the Christian Red Pill online community is a kind of elitism. Those who are blessed with the social and physical charisma and have their pick of women seem wholly incapable of understanding or caring what it’s like to have no such advantages. Further, they see no purpose in fostering fellowship with these “lesser” men. There is virtually no redemptive effort at all, and certainly no clear plan for building a community that includes such men, men as God made them. Without an army of common men, there is no one for the leaders to lead into battle against sin. And as long as the elites keep bashing common men for being common, there can be no true church on the earth. We have failed to define what is good Red Pill living for men without those elite advantages.

The goal is not great marriages, but great men. Yes, there are clear tendencies in how God works among us. There are precious few men who are supposed to endure a Gomer as Hosea did. There aren’t that many men who are supposed to remain celibate in the church body, and it has nothing to do with leadership, per se. But if the majority are supposed to be married and building strong moral families for a strong covenant community, then we need the proper foundation. And that foundation is the biblical definition of manhood. It’s a definition that is partly informed by the Red Pill lore, but does not rest on what what seems to be the common over-emphasis on romantic relationships.

If we cannot change the meaning of the term “Christian Red Pill,” then we need to call this something else. Either way, we can’t keep doing what has already been done, which has been mostly failure. That is, it’s mostly failure in the sense that, so far, few men have those good relationships with the world. And that’s not the biblical standard. It should not rest on whether those men are born with the talents and charisma of the romantic upper class. It should rest on a communion of saints who build each other up to serve the Lord.

One of the most disappointing things has been just how the Red Pill movement has failed to lift up the men who are fallen. Let’s stop eating our own. We cannot redeem our women from the idolatry of feminism if we don’t first climb out of our own idolatries. It won’t matter what you consider the apex of Red Pill manhood if it doesn’t include actual leadership that guides lesser men to a higher standard. Not everyone needs to be like the apex, but we sure could use a lot more thoughtful guidance for those we need in abundance who walk the wider paths of common manhood. We need to change the definition of “common manhood” for the covenant community.

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Black Kettle Grasslands and Antelope Hills

Posted on July 22, 2021 by ehurst

We continue with the photos taken from yesterday’s trip to Western Oklahoma.

From what I understand, a major element in the declaration of the national grasslands is that it prevents people from changing the natural flora. Most of the land outside the National Grasslands is growing other kinds of grass, or even crops. This first image is roughly the middle of the grasslands, showing both the flora and the unique hilliness that makes driving through it so wonderful.

Where there isn’t a landscape deeply carved by water run-off, there are these hills everywhere. This one is typical of what you would see driving in this area. Keep in mind that most of the roads through the National Grasslands are oil roads; they are maintained by the county, but exist primarily to access the dozens of oil wells out here. There are a few houses and ranching is allowed, so most of the land is fenced, and the roads are littered with cattle-guards.

Despite the fish-eye effect, I think this image does justice to how some of the hills look. It’s a panorama stitched together from five shots, where the road ran right up against the foot of one hill. There were cattle just visible on the far side as the road took us around this. It’s all gravel roads with few exceptions.

As we began moving toward the next natural wonder in the area, we spotted this very old house. From what I could tell, this is easily one of the first structures in this part of the country. It’s covered in a kind of stucco, and appears to have been added onto at some point. There aren’t many of these in the area.

A few miles north of the Black Kettle National Grasslands is a state-owned natural monument called Antelope Hills. It’s a rather small collection of mesas clustered up against the southern bank of the Canadian River, where the river makes a wide sweeping bend to the north. What makes the Antelope Hills so unique is that it is mostly white sandstone, which is exceedingly rare in a state noted for its bright red soil.

The oil road runs through a gap between two of the hills. In times past, schools would actually bring kids out here by the busload and let them wander at will. It’s just possible to climb some of these, but it’s no longer encouraged. A couple of them feature a layer of stone on top that looks almost like a fortress.

This panorama was stitched together from two images inside the gap in the previous image. It shows the view from the bottom. There aren’t very many of these hills, and a pair of them are orphaned from the main cluster, standing off a mile or two east of the rest.

Sadly, several photos just didn’t turn out well. I’m hoping I can take a few more trips this year, maybe even going camping some.

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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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