The Evils of the Gutenberg Editor

Posted on July 3, 2021 by ehurst

Someone has asked for a clearer explanation of why I object to the new Gutenberg Editor on the WordPress.com sites. This blog allows me the freedom to keep the Classic Editor, a choice I don’t have on WordPress’s own site.

I’m writing this in a rather simple text editor. I utterly hate composing anything in a word processor. Even when I expect to publish something through a word processors, I always start with a plain text editor. That’s no mere habit; there’s a very solid reason for it. Further, I’m not alone by a long shot.

When the focus of your mental process is honest expression, you will use language differently from people who have some other purpose. It’s not so much a question of generational differences, but a different philosophy entirely. I’ve been involved in the public education system and I can tell you from experience that, over the past few decades, the emphasis has been away from content and more onto presentation. Even content itself has been mangled in teaching to fit this approach. In other words, people aren’t taught to report honestly on anything, but to think and write in terms of propaganda.

Have you noticed the big money in being an “influencer”? It means learning how to make everything you do into advertising. It’s meant to influence people somewhere just below the conscious level. It works quite well. There’s a whole branch of behavioral science dedicated to just this one means of manipulating the common consumer.

This is a reflection of what education does to people, both in common schools and in college. The Gutenberg Editor was created to match that philosophical shift. It emphasizes presentation over content. It forces you to think about how the end product will turn out. It discourages thinking about the content; it gets in the way of that kind of process. It keeps throwing in your way questions of presentation. Stop contemplating; just express yourself, and do it this way.

I’m not sure how much of this is down to ADD. Now, quickly I must note that ADD is not what most people think it is, nor what most behavioral scientists have been taught. The research has intentionally asked the wrong questions. It’s really not a malady, but a different approach to thinking that a great many people have always had. However, when the underlying core of educational philosophy began working toward intellectual enslavement, it was recognized that a certain segment of the population simply could not be herded down that path. So they dreamed up a name and treatment plan for it, because anything that makes you resist being herded is a “mental illness.”

At any rate, I don’t operate like the mainstream wants me to operate. I didn’t have trouble in school; I had high grades when I felt like doing the work. The problem is that the system was drifting away from accommodating my different approach to learning. Whatever they think ADD is, it represents a different wiring in the brain. My intellect will sacrifice effort in one area for a preference in promoting another kind of processing.

I must have everything in a pattern. I struggled with memorizing the alphabet until I came up with my own private pattern for learning the letters. I struggled with spelling until I came up with my own mnemonics. I can tell you that discovering etymology made a huge difference; it provided the pattern I needed (not to mention really blessing my grammar). Now I can spell better than just about everyone I know. Though you’ll catch plenty of typos, that’s not a spelling issue, but a matter of how I process. This is far, far better than my handwriting. My brain will let certain kinds of details slide in favor of the big picture.

So I can forget labels and names, in that I struggle to pull them out of memory. I can recognize those names and labels pretty easily when they are presented to me, but I can’t always generate them directly. That kind of processing take a back seat to the bigger pattern that my mind prefers. I excel at things that can be managed by patterns and matrix. I see patterns most people do not see. I’ve become very creative with that.

Furthermore, I think in paragraphs. I don’t think in terms of words and sentences. That should explain a lot for some of you who understand what I’m saying here. My whole process seldom gets below the level of paragraphs. I can rewrite what I know an endless number of times because I don’t learn it in words. Even if I come up with a sentence that captures the essence of something well enough to use it repeatedly, what goes on in the background is the paragraph of thinking that goes with that sentence.

So the Classical Editor for WordPress does only what little I need an editor to do. It allows me very minimal control over the presentation, because I simply don’t care about that. I want to set it and forget it. The Gutenberg Editor demands that you operate with a constant harassment about presentation questions. It hinders me; it’s like always starting from scratch, setting up the presentation every time. It shuts off my flow of thinking. There is too much to do when I need to start writing, and it keeps coming back to seize my attention every few minutes. That’s what block-style editing is supposed to do. It derails deep thinking and gets you bogged down in presentation issues.

And this is entirely intentional. It’s part of the shift to making everyone into an air-head propagandist. You cannot propagandize eternal truth, so it gets censored by the very process itself. For people whose minds work that way already, or who were able to adapt to that, it’s not much of a problem. They are blessed. But I have to have it my way, and I won’t tolerate broken tools when I need to write.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

It’s Done

Posted on July 3, 2021 by ehurst

The other blog is gone now. My convictions tell me something evil is coming that is not my battle, and that blog would have made me target. I can’t say for sure when the evil thing will com, but it’s too close to ignore. Besides, it’s the kind of thing where it will creep in unnoticed by most people. Things are changing dramatically on the Internet and most people have no idea just how big and ugly is the hatred for people who espouse the gospel of Jesus the Messiah.

For the time being I’ll keep the underlying account open so that I can comment on other blogs. If that turns into a boondoggle, I’ll delete the account itself. This blog will stay active until some external force shuts it down. That’s actually quite possible, so brace yourself.

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You’ll Know What to Do

Posted on July 2, 2021 by ehurst

In some ways, it won’t matter whom you imagine is pulling the strings. The vast majority of those involved in government — both official and de facto government — are your enemy. The people will be rotated in and out of the system, but the trends remain stable because it’s steered by demons.

However, it’s not as simple as is commonly believed. Demons don’t set the agenda specifically. Demons provide the false desires that drive people to seek opportunities for self-gratification. Demons will offer whatever inducement gets people on the wrong path, and it’s hardly uniform. Thus, the people running the show will hold varying motives, but they are uniform in being false motives, based on things that God simply will not allow.

Further, the demonic influence is concerned only with anything-but-revelation. The apparent unity of human planning is simply a matter of tactics. The unity itself is false; it’s only apparent. In the end, those who chase demonic dreams will betray each other because of their competing false gods. But leading up the final crescendo of collapse, there will be a functional unity that is itself a tool of Satan to get people on board.

We are nearing one of those false crescendos. The elitists who think they rule, along with the elitists who actually do rule (for now), believe they are on the final leg of their plot to seize total control. Their actions and pronouncements betray this. It will be a tribulation rising to the level of apocalypse. It will be one of those times that test the moral fiber of the little people who aren’t among the elite. As you might expect, the vast majority will fail this test.

Given that the fundamental idea behind the elitist propaganda is to make us so miserable that we beg for slavery, you should expect things to get very uncomfortable. It would be easy to get bogged down in the details of what they plan for us. Some of the big items that show up on our radar: manufactured racial tension and rioting, debt and banking “reforms” that seize all physical property of any significance, currency collapse and increasing virtualization of money, false medical mandates with lock-downs and toxic “vaccines,” the false panic about “global warming,” etc.

For me, one of the worst things is the rising censorship. It’s not enough to keep us on the margins so that nobody pays attention; they want to control our very thoughts. This is the one area wherein I’m likely to become something of an activist. That’s because it directly affects the gospel message. This follows the basic principle that I teach: defend the domain that God has placed in your hands. My domain is the message, and I’ll engage in whatever measures are necessary to keep unholy hands out of that. My convictions don’t place many constraints on that defense.

How do we overcome? “And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death” (Revelation 12:11 NASB). The willing sacrifice of our Messiah becomes both the model and the power to forge ahead with the divine agenda against all resistance. We win. Our testimony is more than mere words, but in Hebrew mystical language, “word” refers to all the actions that come from a driving agenda of faith. It is our shalom. And it’s our lack of fear in the face of death that means we can avoid the normal human constraints the hinder people from holding to an eternal purpose.

This apocalypse is what we are here for; it’s the reason we keep on living. Otherwise, this is a very good time to die. Don’t get lost in worrying about all the things people plan against us. Pray and keep your eye on your convictions. You’ll know what to do when the moment comes.

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Let Nobody Stand between You and the Savior

Posted on July 1, 2021 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

A Couple of Things

Posted on June 30, 2021 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Odds and Ends 09

Posted on June 29, 2021 by ehurst

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

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

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

——

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

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

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

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

——

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

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

Posted in personal | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Oppressive Technology

Posted on June 28, 2021 by ehurst

I’m laughing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in computers | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

New Testament Doctrine: Matthew 4:1-11

Posted on June 26, 2021 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Long Way to Go

Posted on June 26, 2021 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Fields are Bountiful

Posted on June 25, 2021 by ehurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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