Damned PMA Gospel

Posted on July 12, 2021 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Story I Can Tell Now

Posted on July 11, 2021 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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New Testament Doctrine: John 2:13-25

Posted on July 10, 2021 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ready to Stand Alone in the Lord?

Posted on July 10, 2021 by ehurst

Ironic note: I had a bit of struggle getting a valid response from the website where this article was hosted — an article about the Internet being seriously crippled by bad guys. In this article, Brandon Smith tells us of yet another coming woe. He attempts to draw a picture of economic activity badly hampered by a large-scale breakdown of the Internet.

Then he attempts to point out how easily TPTB could get their minions to generate such an event. He associates it with yesterday’s Cyberpolygon war-gaming scenario hosted by the Word Economic Forum (WEF). Keep in mind that major hassles came out of the WEF’s previous war-games. The COVID plague was war-gamed by the WEF two months before it was declared officially. Thus, Smith suggests that, in the next month or two, we could see unprecedented disruptions of Internet access and traffic.

Well, people who spend a lot of time studying how the Net works have been warning for years how fragile it all is. The level of interdependence is beyond comprehension, and every bit of it seems to be absolutely essential. You’d have to spend a lot of time looking into it to realize that the vast majority of what makes the Internet possible involves thousands of commercial operations you never hear about. Internet technology is really quite arcane, and its resilience has long been compromised by all the efforts to pass off the grunt work to willing third parties.

Two things come to mind about all this. One is that we should all strive to DIY anything that matters to us. Notice I said “strive” — it’s not a dire necessity, just something you should consider. And it’s not just the Internet, but a million other things we do in our daily lives. Discern those things for which you know something useful, and then identify those things for which you are utterly dependent on God to provide.

The second is related: You should be ready to stand alone. If the Net goes down for any extended time, it’s going to be very hard for us to keep our little virtual community alive. I’ve been warning about that possibility for a long time. The point was that you should search your heart to ensure you have absorbed as much faith teaching as you can use, with the awareness that we are working toward the day when we will be cut off from each other.

It’s not the destruction of a community; it’s the dispersion of a divine influence. If all your focus is inward on the community, you’ll struggle to keep faith alive when that community dissolves, regardless of why it happens. Our whole emphasis for quite some time has been to make you independent, even as we strive to make the most of our fellowship while we have it. So let me push that one more time: Don’t let your faith depend on me or anyone else.

I can’t estimate how much an Internet disruption could affect the use of cellphones. That’s why I’ve encouraged all of us to exchange phone numbers (mine — 405-503-1692, voice or text). Unlike Smith, I have neither the interest nor funding to get into HAM and Packet Internet communications. Besides, my experience has been that such is even more vulnerable to disruptions (I learned that in the military).

So what’s left is the one consideration that TPTB themselves rely on the Internet, and it’s virtually impossible that they would have built up an alternative means of networking. Their vulnerability is our safety factor. I find it odd that a major portion of these people know so little about the Internet in the first place. Most of them are far more dependent on third party expertise than is average for our little community. Probabilities are high that, whatever it is they preserve for themselves will work for us.

These are just some things to consider in the coming days.

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Random Photos 11

Posted on July 9, 2021 by ehurst

Lots of pictures today. This is my second season clearing the excess greenery from the bridge on Midwest Boulevard. My first shot is before I started. Keep in mind that this bridge is part of the section of road closed because of the bridge just south of here over Crutcho Creek is blocked for as yet unknown reasons.

It wasn’t that hard because I had already cut it harshly last year. This year it was just a bunch of respawned limbs and so forth. While I was doing this, some guy was parked on the bridge, normally illegal, but there are no patrols on closed roads. He was fishing just a few yards away over the same side of the bridge, also illegal. We chatted for awhile, then he got tired of no reaction from the fish and left.

Back south of me, on the other side of that closed bridge, this tree had fallen into the road. Guess what? I’m not trimming that back, at least not until I take care of higher priorities. If OKC can’t be bothered to take care of it, I’ll get it later in the month. Right now, I’m working on another neglected bridge.

The Britton Road bridge over that same Canadian River has been neglected for many years. I decided to start working on it. What you see here is part 1 of the intruding foliage. There’s a lot of it because there’s so much land beneath the bridge in the flood plain, and stuff just loves to grow up against the structure.

This is what it looks like after I cut it back. There was also a part 2, but the images get too repetitive. The point was how much there was. I got two parts done and there was a third I didn’t touch because I ran out of drinking water. I stopped when there was one bottle left, and it was empty before I got home. This bridge is about ten miles from my apartment. I’ll come back and do more next week.

Out at Draper Lake, the blackberries are ripening. They should have a decent long season, at least two weeks. These bushes are in the fence along the northwest entrance path into the lake’s recreational area. Wild blackberries have a distinct taste, quite unlike the bland commercial stuff you can buy the grocery stores. They are also dangerous to pick from, not only because of the heavy thorns, but they host deer ticks.

Dewberries are a relative of blackberries, but closer to raspberries. The vines aren’t so thick, and tend to droop and run across the ground. These bushes are clustered in with some other greenery, and without the berries are quite hard to pick out in the image. You can see this is the end of their season. They overlap the blackberries, but come a few weeks earlier and tend to fade quickly out in the sun. The berries are also smaller in this setting. They grow a lot better, and bear fruit a lot longer, where there is more water and some shade during part of the day.

The surprise for me this year was the sand plums. They are prolific on shrubs that in previous years hadn’t shown any fruit at all. They are edible but extremely tart until they are almost ready to fall on the ground. These are very close to picking, but doing so is risky for humans. Those limbs are covered in very long spikes. Back when I tried to harvest these, I used an extended grabber stick and still got scratched up. Still, it’s nice to see them back again after such a long absence.

Finally, these miniature daisies were covering the ground for a mile or so along the bottom of the dam. There are other flowers blooming right now, but these are so dominant because they can come back after mowing.

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XR: Another Counterfeit

Posted on July 9, 2021 by ehurst

Before we look at the counterfeits, it’s best to know the genuine thing well enough to spot the fakes.

At the root level, this fallen world is supposed to be decentralized, tribal, racist, and in various levels of conflict over resources. That’s what God says He expects of us at a fundamental level. We don’t have to be at each other’s throats, but by far one of the greatest sins is the mere idea that we should all be united under one government. Any move toward that invokes God’s wrath on an entirely different level. He thoroughly hates centralized governments. The decentralized tribal nation is God’s default requirement before we discuss anything further.

Side note: That tribal government must not be anything other than ANE feudalism. Any hint of democracy and depersonalization of authority and accountability will incur His wrath.

On top of that, the next layer of requirement is that cultures promote the heart-led ideal. He reserves particular distaste for the Western intellectual traditions, in that Western epistemology seeks to lock humanity under the Fall. The fundamental tenet of Western Civilization is that human reason is the summum bonum, closing the door to all but man-centered religion. This is the very nature of the Fall itself. The only path to avoid wrath and destruction is to build a culture that centers on giving preference to convictions, and seeking to clarify what they demand.

At the third and final level, God demands that humanity live under covenants that reflect divine revelation. The Bible presumes you understand that all written covenants it records are models, manifestations of something which in itself is ineffable. It’s not the specifics of the covenant, but the core nature of how covenant conveys divine will that matters. Only within a valid covenant can we escape human frailties and hope for some measure of peace on earth — AKA shalom.

The ultimate covenant is Christ Himself.

Once you get this clear picture clear in your mind, then it’s not too hard to see the flaws of things like the XR idolatry. You quickly see how utterly incompatible it is with divine revelation. You realize that it is a hideous demonic lie that warrants resistance, even to the point of warfare. It is an open and direct attack on shalom.

If God can defeat enemies in the field through the glory of a choir praising His name, if God can destroy siege armies outside the city walls in response to a shepherd’s humble prayer before Him, then no covenant tribe should fear the greatest combined army on this earth. Rather, it is the arrogant human mass forces that should fear the covenant tribe.

Don’t resist without a valid covenant. Once you’ve established that anchor point, you can walk in the assurance that what then seems obvious in your convictions is the path you need to take. The issue is not whether you’ll resist this idolatry, but how. God intends to reveal His glory through your resistance; you need a vision of how that plays out.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is a false idol. You have zero obligation to it, despite how governments are quickly being enslaved to it. How you go about resisting this forced idolatry is between you and God.

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A Shalom Witness

Posted on July 8, 2021 by ehurst

I’ve always rejected the prevailing culture. From my earliest memories, I knew the world I lived in was not right. But instead of being a rebel, I was more nerdy, in withdrawing somewhat into a fantasy world. It wasn’t mere childhood stuff; this was me searching for a better reality, without drugs and other forms of escapism.

I kept searching for a Word from God, though I surely would not have characterized it that way until much later. The search was among a lot of other possible worlds until I began to sense a divine purpose and calling that saw me abandon some of those options. Still, I bore an awful lot of baggage I never even knew I could reject, so it took a very long time.

Meanwhile, I knew beyond all doubt that I belonged to Christ. So I kept trying to serve Him in the existing system. I even went so far as to visit a lot of different kinds of churches, which pissed off my parents. Even into adulthood I kept searching. Nothing was any more comfortable than the church in which I grew up, so I went back to that, but only because it was simply more familiar. At some point, that also played out, and I left mainstream religion for good, in part because it was clear the leadership didn’t want me around.

On the one hand, I’m utterly certain mainstream religion has a lot of things wrong. There may have been some early bitterness at rejection, but I’m long past that. I’d love to share with them the peace I’ve found with the God they claim, the peace they believe in, but never find for themselves. Or, to be more precise, a quality of peace they’ve never found so far. On the other hand, I don’t expect them to come running when I announce there’s something better. Still, I can’t simply sit in silence; I must testify.

Today I make much of the Covenant, AKA Biblical Law. I prefer the term “covenant” for a lot of reasons, not least because it’s the best English word we have for what really matters. All it really needs is a nudge to get people thinking about what it means from a biblical Hebrew perspective. The labels we use on parts of the Bible — “testament” — is mostly a synonym for covenant. We have the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. The difference is that “testament” implies a written record of something that isn’t confined to the words.

Still, I know that my effort to promote living under the Covenant in the Hebraic sense is not the popular meaning of the term. I still have to explain it every time I mention it to an audience outside our Radix Fidem community. Indeed, that explanation is the bulk of what I have to say to outsiders, churchian or otherwise. I do my best to portray the full realization of what it means to embrace the Covenant, especially in terms of what it demands from us.

Living the Covenant means setting your foot on a lifelong path of leaving behind the prevailing society. It doesn’t have to mean you ape my choices, but it surely means withdrawing a good distance from the world into which you were born. There are a lot of different directions that you can go, but if you aren’t recognizably on the same path I’m on, however far off on your own parallel, I have no obligation to take you seriously.

It feels pretty lonely out here. But I know that has more to do with the overwhelming noise we get from every other choice humans make, against what appears to be such a slender slice of humanity opting to take the Covenant seriously. There is no doubt in my mind quite a few folks out there are on the same path, but I can’t spot them over the herds running in the wrong direction. There’s simply too many in the herd and too few on the path.

By God’s mercy and grace, that could some day change. It’s the same grace and mercy that allowed me to find such a wonderful Covenant wife. In one sense, we were made for each other. It’s not as if we couldn’t both have found adequate mission-minded spouses elsewhere, but that God steered us together at the right moment to find the best either of us was likely to encounter for a very long time and distance in life. We are blessed, indeed.

Side note: I don’t buy into the false humility about whether I’m the best God had for my wife. I won’t take seriously any such false humility from her, either. After our 40+ years together, and all we’ve encountered along the way, we both know we could not have done better than what we have now. I’m sure we could have found partners more or less adequate and bearable, but this kind of joy is not possible without the miracle touch of God. We certainly didn’t have full knowledge when we started, but it became obvious rather early that there was no reason to look for greener pastures in any sense. If I didn’t believe God had called me to be her man, and her my woman, I wouldn’t have wasted her time.

That’s because the whole point has always been the Covenant mission, which is actually enhanced by our partnership. And nobody has to tell me just how rare this kind of marriage is. I’ve seen the weakness in thousands of marriages, and how it distracts from the Covenant mission. The best we can do is ask God to heal what He will, and in the meantime do our best to demonstrate just how well it can work when folks choose to live under the Covenant.

It’s a very major part of our shalom witness. This is a demonstration of what God can do when His people fully walk in the Covenant.

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The Divine Mandate

Posted on July 6, 2021 by ehurst

A major element in bringing God’s wrath on the West is feminism. While feminism isn’t peculiar to Western culture, what is unique is how Western feminism overwhelms the entire civilization and social culture. Even the Hebrews fought it to some degree with the residual Canaanite idolatry of various manifestations of Ashtarte, but it seldom resulted in the horror of female dominance, even from a background position.

Just a reminder: Scripture says flatly that female dominance is rejecting God’s revelation. It’s not that women can’t take leadership in certain important elements of a covenant existence, but that without trusting His design for male shepherding overall in protecting shalom, there is no Covenant. And without the Covenant, there are no blessings, no shalom. God is quite willing for the majority of humanity to forfeit all the divine heritage to Satan.

We should never be surprised when the majority of humanity prefers to live outside the Covenant privileges. Jack notes that it would seem Korea is among the last few cultural islands to yet resist Western feminism on any scale as public policy. At the same time, those who comment on his blog seem to agree by consensus that such resistance has little hope. The invasive nature of feminism, with our without the rest of Western influence, is almost sure to conquer even Korea eventually.

Note: Korea’s brand of male dominance is no model for us to follow. It takes precious little from the biblical model of shepherding. I’m not proposing any worldly solution. There isn’t one. Without the Covenant, there is no grounds for resistance to this malady. Reason plus facts could lead to a slightly better answer, but it has never been enough to change human nature. The leverage simply isn’t there. On top of that, there is near zero chance that world could arrive at the biblical answer by mere reason. Every form of resistance to feminism on anything but Covenant grounds is doomed to failure. Red Pill lore by itself is not enough.

And it would be easy to get lost in all the details of how the Bible says we should handle things while just trying to debunk the Western mythology. There is a real need to compare the two, but it quickly bogs down with the truculence of feminists among believers who don’t realize all their assumptions are feminist. They are blind to God’s revelation before they even start. It’s not just a matter of how-to; it’s a fundamental orientation that begins at the very roots of assumptions about reality. Virtually every woman you encounter on Planet Earth today will take it as a personal insult that you would dare to resist feminine dominance.

So, there is no practical remedy for the rest of the world. It would take a mighty miracle of God for even the few cloisters of covenant communities to grasp this issue clearly. This is not the counsel of despair, but rather the recognition that we are in a time of apocalypse. There is no way to avoid the full measure of God’s wrath, and it calls for a level of destruction no one can imagine. It comes very close to meriting another Noahic event, wiping out a significant portion of the human population. The moral disease is that pervasive.

I’m convinced the Lord isn’t going to take it that far. However, the place where we end up could easily be rather close to it. My convictions say that the end is not yet determined, but will depend to some degree on things you and I cannot measure. If we hope to salvage anything at all, our best estimate would come from each individually striving to embrace the Covenant and shalom.

In a day when it’s a precious gift of God that any one household is united under the Covenant, it does us good to make a realistic assessment of where we are. Korea isn’t going to be a shining light in the darkness, nor any other nation or culture. Pray that you will find your own peace with God, and then consider what you can do to preserve the knowledge of that peace for others. We have a divine mandate to transmit the Covenant knowledge to future generations. How are you going to do that? What is your mission under that calling?

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Calling a Failure What It Is

Posted on July 4, 2021 by ehurst

The Covenant of Moses was a particular implementation of the more ancient Covenant of Abraham. Moses had a distinct shelf-life (that people, that place, that time in history), whereas, Abraham was eternal. Jesus restored the Covenant of Moses, then dissolved it, throwing everything back into the Covenant of Abraham. But then, in Jesus it was translated into the Covenant of the Messiah. It was clarified and updated. In so doing, Jesus clarified Moses, too. Jesus breathed life into the underlying purpose of all covenants from God by becoming Himself the Living Covenant, the one final revelation of God’s will for us.

I strive to follow my Master, Jesus. My convictions demand that I seek to restore His Covenant with His people. There are contextual differences, of course. For example, we don’t have to deal with the weight of legacy involving an ethnic identity that Jesus faced. On the other hand, we don’t have the legacy of miraculous protection for a whole nation, either. Instead, we have a scant few miracles of mercy applied to individuals here and there. Miracles aren’t a notable indication of Covenant authority with the Church as it was with Israel.

But Jesus was restoring both the demands of the Covenant along with the blessings of the Covenant. That’s what I’m trying to do. The contextual differences are substantial. We can still count on persecution to be a major feature, but the means and methods of persecution will differ. The people who viscerally hated early Christians were almost entirely restricted to Jews. But the power to actually do harm was in the hands of non-Jewish government. Jews had to find leverage to induce government persecution of Christians. That’s how it is today.

Our message remains a threat to Judaism for all the same reasons. It’s the means and methods that differ. The ubiquitous tracking and surveillance of our day is in itself not a significant threat. It’s what governments naturally do. It has been in place for a long time, though it has grown significantly. But the real problem is how the resulting information about us is used. Part of the problem is that the term “government” now includes a whole range of entities who aren’t formally government, but who are so deeply entwined with government that there is no functional difference. So Judaism uses both kinds of agencies against us.

Recently we learned that Trump has been seeking to keep hold of his former audience in part through organizing new Internet platforms for addressing that audience. A couple of days ago something called GETTR was announced as part of this effort. The reason he’s doing this is two-pronged. One, he already has been ejected from the very most popular forums on the Net. During his time in office, he had some leverage to force those forums to remain open to him, but that’s gone now. So he began courting fairly popular alternative forums. Two, is that some of those forums refused to play by certain rules.

Those rules were asserted by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Trump does nothing without Jared being involved, and we all know Jared is a very activist Jewish Zionist. Whenever Trump offered someone financial support to open up a big place for him to address his audience, Jared went along behind demanding that everything Jews and Zionists don’t like be removed from that forum. Several big influencers took the money and all of their comments about Judaism and Israel disappeared. Try to understand: Jared and his ilk have already catalogued everything on the Net that they don’t like, and that they want removed. At least one platform (Gab) resisted on the grounds that their whole purpose was anti-censorship, so they didn’t get the money. GETTR replaces Gab in Trump’s plans.

This is not a Democrat-Republican thing. There are Zionists on both sides, as well as those who resist Zionism in various ways. So long as the ruling regime is divided on the issue, it prevents Zionists from completely shutting down all dissent. For now, it’s the commercial half of government that is strongest in supporting Zionist censorship.

At some point in the history of Judaism, it appeared the Pharisees triumphed. However, we see today the secularism of the Sadducees has been reborn in political Zionism. It’s not Judaism, per se, but it’s a secularized version of it. Zionists will use anyone who can be manipulated on any grounds. They viscerally hate Christians, but you can see the partnership between Zionist leadership and Western evangelicals. But religious Jews are often no different on that point; they hate Christians. The Talmud has declared Christians the most worthy of all Gentiles for abuse and death.

Jewish leadership rejected Jesus because He pointed out how they had made themselves enemies of the God they claim. Like the Samaritans, they use God’s name, but actually refer to some other deity that doesn’t exist. The divine mandate for Israel has passed to those who follow Jesus. We are the New Israel. Not an earthly nation, but a kingdom of hearts. We can harvest the shalom our Father promised Israel. In so doing, we will trigger the same hounding persecution of those who think they have God over a barrel.

Keep a watchful eye so that you can be ready to handle that persecution from whichever direction it comes. Their primary objective is to silence the gospel message, which message includes identifying Jews as the tragic failure to embrace the God who called them into being.

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New Testament Doctrine: Matthew 4:12-25

Posted on July 3, 2021 by ehurst

It was common for rabbis to accumulate disciples. All the more so was this true for Messianic preachers. This messianic fervor had been running rampant since at least the Period of the Maccabees, and had reached a fever pitch under John’s preaching. So it was that John had disciples serving under him almost as soon as he began preaching and baptizing in the Jordan River.

And every relative of Jesus who had heard of the miraculous events surrounding both His and His cousin John’s birth were sure to be wondering if either or both could be some fulfilment of the Messianic Promises. In the midst of this, we are reminded that Hebrew culture makes a virtue of nepotism. One of John’s disciples was a relative of both him and Jesus (Andrew).

Disciples were seldom full time in the sense of year-round. Something like that required monetary support. While preaching and teaching would typically include passing the hat, we can assume John had actual patrons, and we know for certain Jesus did, some wealthy. How early that support began is anyone’s guess, but it’s important to see how common it was.

While our focal passage is in Matthew’s Gospel, we can collate from the other Gospels, along with some external sources, to discover that John the Baptist wasn’t arrested while Jesus was in the wilderness. Rather, Jesus returned from the Temptations and hung around John for some days. We have no record of what the two discussed, but at some point John encourages two of his disciples to follow Jesus.

One of them is Andrew, who later introduces his brother Simon Peter. These two were cousins of Jesus, so they already knew Him, and got involved as soon as He began His own ministry. Jesus was making plans to go up to Galilee. During this process, He also picked up Philip and Nathanael. This was about the time John was arrested for preaching that Herod Antipas had sinned in marrying his half-brother’s ex-wife, Herodias, a violation of the Covenant of Moses.

Matthew tells us that John’s arrest is connected with this move to Galilee. It’s not as if Jesus was fleeing to a different jurisdiction; where John was baptizing was on the border of Perea, ruled by Herod Antipas who put him in prison, but so was Galilee. Rather, the most likely explanation on the human level was the rising tension with the Pharisees and Sadducees in Jerusalem. Jesus was ready to echo John’s message, but it’s at this time He seems to be securing support for His own work.

Jesus and His followers all went up to Nazareth. They were healthy men without luggage or anyone to slow them down, so they arrived in the area within a few days. Jesus brought the boys with Him to a wedding in Cana and performed His first miracle there. The miracle itself is an engaging story, and it’s likely His other cousin John was there in person to witness the whole thing. Next, Jesus moves His family household to Capernaum and begins preaching and performing miracles around the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

Meanwhile, the disciples had mostly gone back to their homes right there in Bethsaida, just a short distance away. Jesus went back to gather them again, but now it’s full-time ministry. There was enough support from people who had heard His preaching and seen His miracles that they could afford it. He adds two more cousins: James and John.

Matthew notes that Jesus fulfills the prophecies found in Isaiah 9:1-2. We have to take a moment to capture what Isaiah was saying. The northern border region of Israel during Isaiah’s time was notorious for being quick to abandon the Covenant and embrace idolatry. It was a very Gentile kind of place, which is like saying they were no longer protected by the Covenant. Thus, they were also the first to bear the brunt of Assyria’s attack, partly for that reason. Their reputation for being a very morally dark place was well deserved, but the prophet promises they will also be the first to see the dawn of the final revelation in the Messiah.

Thus, the ministry of Jesus blossoms powerfully, with news of Him reaching the whole Roman region of Syria. All of His miracles were latent in the Covenant of Moses. When restoring shalom, it was entirely normal under the Covenant for such miracles to manifest. All of these blessings were the inheritance of the Children of the Covenant, but had been robbed from them by the Talmudic teaching of the Pharisees, and the cynical secularism of the Sadducees. The miracles were a matter of playing catch-up to what should have been theirs already.

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