The Chinese Grip

Posted on May 5, 2021 by ehurst

Here’s something interesting: China has concrete plans for taking over the Internet itself. It’s not as if this is news, but it’s a much more explicit statement than we would expect. China is not known for public honesty on much of anything. But lest you think this is just more China-bashing, the CCP’s attitude about the open Internet has long been very clear by how they work internally, and how they interact with international Internet boards and technology forums.

Keep in mind how China operates. It’s not like the abusive muscling of the US, wherein the US tells the rest of the world, “You want this, and we will supply it — at our price.” The price usually comes out being political control and plundering of all resources. The Chinese come in very friendly and simply offer to help fund and build whatever it is the locals actually want. All the Chinese want in return is a cut of the action to repay loans.

Naturally, China is quite willing to loan more than the clients can easily repay. But they are patient and rather kind about it. That’s because their plans are long term. They want the client states beholden to them across multiple generations. At some point, they will use the leverage for things like “helping” the client state with their Internet. And that’s how they gain control of things that really interest them. The Chinese don’t actually want to rule those client states, just certain aspects of how the world at large does things.

In other words, China works like a drug dealer. She gets you hooked and then uses you until you are no longer useful. She does not hesitate to manipulate on the basis of human frailty. You’ve no doubt seen hints of how the Chinese have wormed their way into the US. Every month brings another story of someone caught spying for China, and it always turns out to be a matter of various inducements, whatever it takes to get the spy beholden to China.

Side note: The Russians aren’t as good at espionage as the Chinese. The Russians have too much of their own cultural sense of honor, though it’s different from the Western version. But the Soviets were never as driven as people claimed. However, the Chinese will wallow in anything to get what they want. For them, that is their sense of honor.

The Chinese sense of loyalty is quite different from that of the West. It’s openly tribal, but hard to explain. On the one hand, it’s not that Chinese people cannot be decent to other humans. On the other hand, they don’t hesitate to run over each other without shedding a tear. They have a totally different sense of moral duty. Thus, the CCP makes Machiavelli seem quite friendly. They are frankly better at this game than the most psychopathic Western tyrant. The inherent inefficiencies of this are the only thing that has kept them from owning the whole world. It’s a very low-trust society, and cheating is pervasive, which is bad for business.

But a great many other tyrants in the world admire the Chinese way of controlling the Internet. It gives tyrants everywhere ideas on how to control the public dialog. The Chinese aren’t trying to take over the world; they thrive on competition in the marketplace. They honestly don’t want to rule the world, which gives them an advantage over our delusional Western elite. The Chinese are far more realistic about what’s possible, and don’t long for things they can’t have.

There’s a certain sense of live-and-let-live, but when it comes to anything that interferes with their internal control over their own people, the CCP get very nasty. For them, the openness of the Internet with all these cultural influences that threaten their grip is intolerable. Thus, they are altogether eager to take over the Internet itself, not the rest of the world population. There’s no realistic way to keep the kind of control they want over their own population with an open Internet, so they are quite willing to spoil it for everyone else. This is a critical element in the future Networked Civilization.

To the degree there is a threat to the gospel message on the Net, nothing is a bigger danger to us.

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Wandering Thoughts

Posted on May 3, 2021 by ehurst

It’s not as if nothing out there is happening, but there’s not much that requires a reaction right this moment. There is nothing we can do for people who reject the Covenant. So long as they remain outside the Covenant, they aren’t our problem. Then again, those who attack the Covenant do come to our attention, but only if God has placed in our hands the means to respond, and a calling/mission to do so.

I have a mission to point things out from time to time. For example, from what I can see, TikTok is, at least in part, a gateway for young ladies to enter the porn market. The TikTok app doesn’t exclude porn, even though the primary user base is juveniles. It doesn’t matter what the young ladies imagine their audience to be; it’s one step away from the infamous Only Fans, a DIY porn site for pay. Look for that market to expand.

That we can do nothing about this kind of problem doesn’t keep us from praying. But when we pray about it, it helps to keep a clear eye on the larger move behind it. The more modern manifestations of the Tower of Babel always include a major push to degrade the little people. The best way to do this is not by force, but by provoking an appetite for dissipation. More the point, it makes degradation normal. TikTok is all good clean fun, no? Just a generation ago, it would have been shocking and scandalous.

We can dispute generational value systems, but that would be missing the point. The Bible distinctly prohibits that kind of exhibitionism. In our fallen state, nudity belongs only in a very private context. All the human reasoning about that means nothing; God says what He says. It’s part of my mission to point out these things.

There are plenty of issues over which other people expend a lot of emotion, but that don’t matter to me, things that do not represent a fundamentally moral choice. There is no one righteous computer operating system; they are all born in sin. There is no Christian car brand, etc. A Jesus Frisbee isn’t going to fly better than the others. The market is loaded with nonsense branding.

Sometimes I think I understand where God is leading me on something, only to find myself obliged to reverse course. But I don’t represent my choices as any kind of indicator for you to follow. I’m consciously trying to avoid the “look at me” impulse. On the other hand, I realize that God has touched my life, and everywhere I’ve ever gone on the face of this planet, people decide to follow me, even when I deny that I’m trying to lead. This is simply the way humans are. There are just a handful of people who forge ahead in the assurance they have a mission to fulfill. The rest tend to follow one or another of those driven individuals. If you follow me, you may end up wondering if I actually do know where I’m going.

But those things on which I waver are not critical to the mission itself. Despite my efforts to back myself out of the Internet, I still have things to write and the Net is the only place I can publish. I need the tools to simplify the job. So when I ran Windows on both my computers, I actually had some trouble keeping track of the stuff I write. Windows no longer offers easy networking on a home LAN. It has gotten very convoluted and Byzantine. I had to revert my desktop to running Linux so I could run the network services I needed for all the other machines in the house. It’s not a statement about the superiority of one OS over another, just a matter of choosing the best tool for the job.

Unless you have peculiar needs, don’t follow my lead on this. There are plenty of things I thought I had figured out for the the coming persecution, but I was blindsided by plans God wasn’t going to tell me about in advance. It’s easy for my flesh to imagine that it has things under control.

So now my planning needs to include wheelchair usage, not bikepacking. Did that kill my photography? Not yet, but it has certainly changed the kind of subjects at which I point my camera. I can assure you there’s a lot of subtle stuff I’m not going to see alongside the road because I can’t drive like I used to ride. On the one hand, I’m constrained to spend more time in places where humans have changed things a lot. It’s a more art and less natural stuff, more urban and less rural. On the other hand, the natural stuff I’ll shoot will be more a matter of grand landscape vistas, not the little delights I used to run across all the time.

I don’t anticipate knee surgery any time soon. What the medical staff have told me so far indicates I’m still quite a ways from meeting the threshold the system requires. This is not where I wanted to go with the photography. The limitations on my cycling are not at all what I hoped to see, and I’ll definitely miss the hiking. I’m still trying to process what this signals about God’s changes in my mission. There’s a lot of stuff He lets me figure out on my own.

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New Testament Doctrine — Luke 1:5-25

Posted on May 1, 2021 by ehurst

We seek shalom — peace with our Creator. The Messiah came to offer His Nation one last chance to retain all the promises and blessings of the Covenant of Moses. This ancient covenant — a suzerain-vassal treaty — had to be updated a bit in particulars, but would be unchanged in substance. The Messiah came as the personification of that Covenant.

We need not belabor the point: Jesus (Heb. Jeshua) was the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies of a coming Messiah. Luke begins by first settling the issue of the prophesied forerunner.

Zacharias was a priest; his wife Elizabeth was from the same clan. He would have considered himself privileged to have a priestly wife. However, things didn’t turn out that well. Everyone would have assumed that her barren womb was a matter of God’s disfavor. This, despite how both were faithful to the Covenant as best they knew. By the time they were both old enough for everyone to have given up hope, and likely ceased praying on their behalf, something happened.

Zacharias drew the lot for burning incense during one of the two prayer services in the Temple; nothing indicates either the morning of evening service. By this time in Israeli history, the rotation for his division would have come up twice each year. However, to be chosen for this particular privileged duty was easily once in a lifetime. A majority of priests never saw more than the most menial duties, much of it little more than make-work. So this was a big moment, and there was a lot of pressure on the aging priest to get everything perfect. By this time, the ritual was quite complicated, so it required a good bit of time.

Consider this: He is entering the actual Temple. Two chosen helpers would briefly step inside before him. One would remove the ashes of the previous incense offering. The other would enter and place live coals in the center. Both would worship a moment, then back out of the Temple. Nobody else goes in with Zacharias. He brings the incense that represents the prayers of the nation for forgiveness. After this signal opportunity, the other priests would refer to him as “rich.”

At the point where Zacharias entered the doorway, the priests and people around the altar for burnt offerings would have backed away from the burning sacrifice, and the people would be face down on the pavement, asking God to receive their prayers. Zacharias then steps reverently to the incense altar and pours the incense, very specifically with the palm of his hand, not his fingers, onto the glowing coals.

It was a fine art to blend this holy incense. What should happen is that the smoke would rise up like a thin stalk of a plant, bump the ceiling and follow the slight incline up into the top of the Holy of Holies, over the top rail of the curtain. Naturally, some of the smoke would also billow back down and fill the area around the incense altar.

It was a sight to behold, and there’s no doubt Zacharias thrilled to the moment, watching with fascination something rarely seen by any man. He would have bowed in worship and then backed out usually, but this time he was arrested by the presence of an angel by the incense altar. His natural expectation was that somebody was in serious trouble, and it might be him. Angels didn’t show themselves for frivolous reasons.

The angel told him to relax; everything was okay. Indeed, the Lord had heard his years of prayer for children. His wife was going to bear him a son. This will provoke a lot of celebration, but for more than just the one obvious reason. This son would be a special servant of God, and would be raised under the Nazarite vow. Indeed, he would manifest the divine Presence of the Lord from birth, and grow up with a unique sense of divine awareness.

His mission would be to call his nation to repentance. Not just any ordinary revival, his ministry would presage the coming Messiah. This call to repentance would be specifically in preparation for a divine visitation. Zacharias would have associated the angel’s choice of words with the promised return of Elijah (Malachi 4:5-6).

Zacharias was gob-smacked; it was just too much to process. He just could not believe it. Indeed, his wife was too old to get pregnant. How would he know this was not some private fantasy, a delusion he experienced under all the stress of this particular duty?

The angel replied that he was not just any angel, but the divine Messenger Angel of Jehovah, Gabriel. Since Zacharias was so dubious about the whole thing, he would be forced to bear his experience in silence. The Lord would seal up his voice until this promise was fulfilled in reality.

Some of the people outside on their faces began surreptitiously looking around at each other, wondering why the priest was taking so long. Was he in there risking God’s wrath by enjoying the show a little too much? He did come back out eventually, but then when his fellow priests tried to ask what was going on, he was mute. It was clearly something miraculous.

Eventually Zacharias was able to make signs, and perhaps play a little charades until he managed to get across that he had seen a vision. So the let him serve out his rotation voiceless and he traveled back home, somewhere in the Hill Country of Judah (generally between Bethlehem and Hebron).

Sure enough, Elizabeth did conceive a child. She kept it secret for five months, presumably to make sure it was a viable fetus, after which time still birth was far less likely. She didn’t want to celebrate too soon, but she certainly did glorify the Lord for taking away her shame.

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New Series — New Testament Doctrine

Posted on May 1, 2021 by ehurst

This would be a kind of analog of Moses’ Law, but for the New Testament. I didn’t consult with any humans on this. Ya’ll tend to be reticent about such things, so I just went where the wind blew me.

As with the previous study, I’ll bounce through the text to find those passages that emphasize the central thesis. It starts with the Gospels because this is where Jesus ties together the Old and New Covenants. We’ve just finished the Old Covenant, so we need to see how the Messiah completed it and closed it out, by incorporating the underlying thesis into His New Covenant.

So keep this in mind: The whole purpose of revelation is to clarify where we are and what God requires of us. We are fallen creatures. Our progenitors rejected the proper ways for living in God’s Presence. We were thrust out of the Garden, out of ultimate reality into a false reality. We now live in the Shadowlands, where things are, at best, a mere symbol of what’s truly real. At worst, everything that is real has been perverted and hidden.

So the escape plan from this fake reality, and entrance back into the Garden, is recovering the divine revelation we left behind; we need to restore access to the Tree of Life, and that means we stop eating from the Tree of Judgment. Because it’s a living revelation, it has been adapted and expressed in terms that fit our circumstances. The written Word is not God, but a manifestation of what it looks like to obey Him as Lord.

We’ve seen the Covenant of Moses. We’ve looked it over with an eye to what the Covenant actually required, and what it offered. We’ve seen how it was intended to give shape to the mission of participating in divine revelation. Israel was a mission, not a people; their identity was the Covenant, not their DNA. It was meant to make them a shining light to clarify for the fallen world who God is and what He intended for us in Creation.

Having proved it could not be done on human terms, God now intends to show how restoring us to Eden is a matter of the heart, not politics. It requires a changed nature, and nothing less can substitute for that. Nothing external to the soul can provide the necessary shift in focus; it must come from inside.

But as we shall see, the Law still has meaning. Instead of the Sword, it is now the Cross. We still have to experience the death of the fleshly nature, to begin the lifelong process of separating ourselves from the fallen nature that comes with a mortal frame. Insofar as the Old Covenant painted a picture of the moral character of God, it remains an accurate portrayal. It points out the first few steps mankind must take in breathing life into the reborn soul.

Thus, in this study we will emphasize the continuity between Law and Gospel. If the Law is to be understood as divine privilege, and not a restriction, that the Law was the one best way to get the most of this shadowy existence after the Fall, then the Gospel even more so represents a set of boundaries that give shape to the spiritual goal.

Later today will come the first actual lesson.

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Living in Interesting Times

Posted on April 30, 2021 by ehurst

Brandon Smith offers another thoughtful analysis of likely political events here in the US. It’s not a question of agreeing with him on specifics, but of giving thought to what is likely.

For example, he hints at, but does not explore, how some major industries are dominated by left-wing sympathies. If a strong division erupts between red and blue areas of the USA, some of those big corporations will act to cut off the reds. Can you imagine being blocked from major Internet platforms based on your geographic location? Can you imagine Google being leveraged to cut you off if you live in a red state or red county? Not just your account, but you browser would be blocked from even accessing the sites.

I find it dubious that Microsoft would go with that, but Google doing so would not surprise me at all. I can’t guess about Apple, and Facebook would probably take a more complex approach.

And then what about corporations that supply varieties of food items? Can you image Coke refusing to ship product to red areas? Do you know what products are actually part of Coke’s corporate collection? How about certain retail giants closing operations in some markets? You’d be guessing, but it’s wise to give it some thought.

Meanwhile, if you live in a blue area, think about how leftist government officials would suddenly feel free to enforce all the repressive measures for which they have been hesitant up to now.

I find the broader idea of the rising tension and disputes highly probable. Smith notes how red states and counties are already drawing lines that challenge the authority of blue politicians to act. I’m certain there is no particular coherent plan on either side, so I agree that it’s hard to guess when some event will trigger certain responses. We live in interesting times.

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Say What He Tells You

Posted on April 28, 2021 by ehurst

Let’s try another approach; maybe I can trace out some of the implications you aren’t seeing.

There is a Biblical Law, the Covenant of Christ. It calls for certain basic requirements that humans will deal with each other, and that they will do so in certain patterns He has revealed. I have summarized that with phrases like, “feudal tribal covenant.” While it includes a lot more stuff, like the heart-led way, we’ll let that hang in the air for a moment.

My God has also said in His Word that this world is doomed. Quite specifically He has said that at no time will His people see a human political situation that favors His Biblical Law agenda. No government will ever espouse our divine principles. There should be brief moments when we catch a breather, but nothing sustained. Indeed, as time wears on toward The End, it should get consistently worse for us in pursuing His agenda.

If at any time you actually espouse any human political philosophy, you will have strayed from God’s agenda. You will be guilty of worshiping pagan idols, violating one very clear command from God that He reigns in His children’s hearts. It’s one thing to recognize that certain political philosophies are more comfortable for us, particularly if we grew up in the culture behind it, but if we do not fully shift our fundamental loyalty to God’s agenda, we are very disobedient children indeed.

This leaves us with a consciously acknowledged conflict. We can never be genuinely loyal to any human government; we can never hope to influence things very much. We sure as hell will not be allowed to run things. Even if some of us randomly end up in positions of power, the system itself will inhibit our actions. We will never be fully in charge under any circumstances. How we handle that can range widely, but there is a sense in which we are rather mercenary. Whoever gives us the most room to operate according to God’s agenda will get our votes, so to speak, insofar as any of us bother to get involved.

We are forbidden assimilating to the dominant culture no matter where we are in this world. The biblical Hebrew culture had its place in this world, and that place died on the Cross. Now it belongs in our hearts, but God has warned it will never find a place in this fallen world again. It is a culture and kingdom in hearts alone. We will always be outsiders, a tribe that refuses to assimilate.

A critical element in our agenda is that we will press for the freedom to live as God directs. We would demand the liberty to touch the hearts of those whom God has hidden out there in the world for us to find. How we go about advocating that liberty varies with the context. In general, we have already been warned that doing so within the human political system will risk defilement. It’s a burden we cannot dismiss, so it requires each of us to seek God’s face for clarity of convictions to support our individual calling and mission. Most of the time, it would seem our pressure in favor of that freedom comes by simply acting like we have it, without addressing any human power directly.

Catching hell for that is part of the mission. Persecution is our natural element; it is the proper context for a strong witness. Our whole point is that this world is one big lie, anyway. “Don’t get wrapped up in it,” we tell each other, because God’s messengers said it often enough.

Now, the brand of moxie my Father has given me means that when non-covenant folks start talking politics, I confess openly that I am quite mercenary in the American setting. I have zero principled loyalty to any of the pagan agendas currently seeking popular support. I call them “pagan” quite openly. I stand ready to refute any arguments suggesting that America is in any way a Christian nation. But there are plenty of times when that doesn’t fit the context, so I just chuckle about being mercenary. I don’t take myself that seriously in such company.

You need to establish for yourself whatever it is God wants you to say, and how you are going to say it.

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Inherent Enemies

Posted on April 26, 2021 by ehurst

There’s something fundamental here that we need to make very clear: Western civil government is inherently evil.

I’m still amazed at number of people who share with me their advocacy of using one branch of government against another, of trying to get “the right people” into this or that government office in order to “preserve our liberties.” When it depends on government to preserve our liberties, it’s already too late — if classical Western liberties are what you want.

You see, people of the Covenant don’t want that system in the first place. We want a different system altogether, based on Biblical Law. Even if we had the maximum civil liberty envisioned in the Enlightenment philosophy of the West, we would still not be allowed to have a biblical tribal society with a government ordained by God.

It’s great to celebrate however much we are allowed to associate virtually and discuss these things, but if we lose sight of the ultimate goal, then we’ll always be trapped in that pagan background. Never forget: America is not Christian. It’s pagan, with a syncretic mix of blather using Bible verses taken out of context. This is why, at the very minimum, we must remain aloof from the pagan society around us.

It’s either under the covenant protections, or it isn’t. American political imaginations are entirely outside the Covenant. We have to be clear about that over and over again. What little functional freedom we had to associate together in faith is just about gone, and the civil government is long past the tipping point. There is no hope from that direction. It cannot be rescued from the bad guys.

And let’s make this clear: The bad guys hate you. It’s not that they are so eager to kill you; they’d much rather torture you for the rest of your life. They long to rub your face in it. They prefer to use horrifying measure to force you to confess their damned propaganda. That’s the victory they seek.

Those evil people are in turn steered by another group who really do wish you were dead. These folks in the background share an obsession with reducing human population by about 90%, and folks like us are first on the list to die. We are true believers who cannot be led by human persuasion; we do not submit to reason. We live by conviction, and they consider our convictions inherently evil.

If you’d like to resist in some fashion, God will not bless it unless you first form a proper feudal covenant tribe. That’s a fundamental requirement; you still need His move of the Spirit to resist. It’s not a matter of permit; it must be clearly God’s demand for your tribe. Otherwise you are operating on your own as an individual, and you should expect no support whatsoever from other people, except by accident.

It’s not that God can’t tell you to fight as an individual. You hardly need my permission for that. Conviction is what it is. That’s the whole point in having a teaching about tribulation and persecution: The fundamental assumption is that you are mostly on your own. If you are able to form a genuine covenant tribe in the real world, then it’s a different set of rules. It’s a matter of shared faith and conviction. There has to be a shepherd role and things take a path none of us have ever trod.

Could there be a Christian tribe of assassins? Certainly; assassination is valid under Biblical Law as a means of protecting covenant blessings. Could there be a Christian tribe of political activists? Nope. Engaging the secular system makes it pagan, non-Christian. An assassin’s guild would have motives and goals hard to verbalize in the first place. Political activism is all about slogans and concrete goals that would never meet the definitions of Biblical Law. The American tradition is founded on the assumption that people are not fallen; it’s an inherent rejection of the truth of God.

We should understand American culture and law. We should understand it well enough to despise it as an abomination to God. We should understand why His wrath is falling on America. We should understand how God uses His Covenant people in times of tribulation — both, in terms of what’s possible and what specifically is decreed in this context. Your mission arises from your convictions; that’s God’s decree for you. I’ll do my best to share my convictions, but you have to act on your own even within a presumed shared covenant of Radix Fidem.

If you promote political activism in any way, you have stepped outside of that covenant. Any public statement, any social media posting, in favor of a particular political goal within the American system of government is inherently pagan. Even on places like Facebook, I never hit the “like” button on any post that promotes an American political ideal, regardless who posts it. Correcting false historical presumptions is fine, though at times it can appear to advocate a political policy. Pointing out how propaganda is false is also risky, but it can be done. Getting accurate information is difficult to slice away from advocacy, but I believe it’s worth the risk. Still, you must keep that Sword of the Spirit sharp and cut cleanly between the two activities.

Yes, there are well-meaning fools involved in the system of government. However, the overall system is inherently pagan and anti-Christian. You have to operate under the assumption that all secular government officials are your enemy on one level or another. That’s because the system itself is an enemy of Christ.

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Law of Moses — Conclusion

Posted on April 25, 2021 by ehurst

There are two primary object lessons we can draw from the sum total of this series on the Law of Moses. The first is obvious, and flatly stated several times in Scripture. Take a look Stephen’s condemnation of the Jewish leadership in Acts 7. More than once the Bible condemns Israel as the single most obstreperous nation ever. If God had chosen any other nation to carry the mission of Israel — to live in such a way as to shine the light of revelation to the rest of mankind — things would have turned out better.

God Himself says this. Things could have been better, but that doesn’t mean they would have been good. We can be sure things would not have worked out very well with any nation He could have chosen. This brings us the second lesson which isn’t quite so obviously stated: It is impossible to raise up a human nation that will consistently live up to the standards of Biblical Law. It’s a lesson you should grasp from subtle hints throughout the Bible.

This is why the Kingdom of Christ is a kingdom of hearts. There can be no such thing as a Christian nation. Without a personal commitment and loyalty, no law formulated for political organization will keep us at peace with God. And it is utterly impossible to create a political system that excludes those who refuse to fully commit from the heart. There is no human means for verifying a heart-led consciousness.

Keep in mind: The heart-led consciousness was the norm across the entire Ancient Near East. This is what was expected of people as the basic minimum. It was the foundation of language itself, and written into the moral standards, and thus legal standards, across the board. Yet those nations still struggled to keep people in that mode on a daily basis. How much more difficult is the heart-led way in a time and culture that militates against the very idea itself, as it does in the West?

This is the very foundation of Western Civilization. We console ourselves in recognizing that the West is dying before our eyes. What replaces it so far appears to be a little more amenable to the concept of not trusting solely in the human reasoning. There will be at least a little more room for the heart-led way in the future. It remains to be seen what kind of accommodation we will find, but it will be better than in the past.

But that won’t make any difference if we don’t take seriously the duty to live the heart-led way, and to apply that consciousness to Biblical Law. The Covenant is the message; it is our testimony. Not just in the obedience, but in the fundamental value system and the blessings we reap within that value system. Thus, our shalom is our testimony.

So it’s not the specific provisions of the Law of Moses that we should learn, but what those provisions say about the character and nature of our God. You’ll notice how crappy performance in the history of Israel always worked out well enough when the leadership was genuinely trying to please the Lord. He was merciful, in part because His own glory was at stake. The heart-led commitment was the key, not the objective performance of the requirements.

This is exactly what Jesus taught as the Law of Moses. Everything He did up to the Cross was a perfect fulfillment of Moses; He was superior to Moses in His Person and role, not to mention having higher standards than Moses. But He remained fully observant of the Law of Moses until His resurrection.

If you want to know what happened during the years between the close of Nehemiah’s ministry and the birth of Christ, you can see it outlined in my book, Ancient Truth: Old Testament History, Chapter 12: Inter-Testamental Period. I can tell you in sum that the events represent very little of the Covenant passion that drove men like Nehemiah.

It shows us that Jesus offered His nation one last chance to get it right. In theory, they could have seized the moment and turned things around. They could have gone on to a glorious future with Him as the Messiah and King. God would have gladly set them free from Roman domination. They had long ago rejected that, and we should hardly be surprised. You and I struggle to meet the mandate as individuals, never mind as a community of faith with no formal organization of human activity.

And yet, the only hope you and I have is to keep in the forefront the heart-led consciousness of shalom as an informal community of faith. That may change a little in the future, but you may never see it if you don’t first accept the obligation to take the leadership wherever you are, and walk in Biblical Law. Keep the faith you have now and let’s see what God has planned.

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Law of Moses — Nehemiah 13

Posted on April 24, 2021 by ehurst

We skip over some chapters that recount lots of names and details. Chapter 9 is a rich confession of how Israel had failed to honor the Covenant. It’s very worthy of reading purely on a devotional basis. In the following chapters, Nehemiah recounts better organization of the Temple services, the necessary support for the priests and Levites to stay on the job, and other matters of adding to the city population by a tithe of those living out in the villages.

You would think all of this would be enough to get them back on track. Nehemiah returned to his duties in the imperial court in 432 BC, indicating that he had stayed in Jerusalem 12 years. During his absence, things quickly fell apart.

Our focal passage opens with some background for the rest of the chapter. From a wider survey of the history of the Covenant (see Deuteronomy 23:3-7), we know that Edomites and Egyptians were allowed to join the Covenant (enter the Court of Israel) with the third generation of conversion. Thus, a household that embraced the Law of Moses would see their grandchildren fully embraced as Children of the Law. But for Moabites and Ammonites, because they had conspired together with Balaam to subvert the process of the Conquest, were forever banned from full participation even after ten generations.

While a precise translation from the Hebrew and Aramaic texts is never easy, this section is particularly muddy to us. Near as we can tell, during that ceremony dedicating the wall around Jerusalem, a portion of the Law was read noting these conditions against Ammonites and Moabites. There was no excuse for not knowing, much less violating them.

During the reign of Darius II (424-403 BC), Nehemiah returns to Jerusalem after a long absence. The year is unspecified, but it was at least a decade long absence. Whatever change it brought with the imperial succession, Nehemiah still has the same authority over the Judean people as before. He comes to discover that the High Priest at the time (Eliashib) had allied with the Ammonites. Again, Ammonites were declared by God eternal enemies of the Covenant.

Eliashib had cleared out one of the larger chambers in the Temple building itself so that Tobiah could have his own apartment when he came to visit. Ordinary Judean laymen weren’t allowed up on the elevated foundation of the Temple building, but Eliashib was hosting an Ammonite inside it. Nehemiah was so disgusted that he had Tobiah’s stuff tossed out in the street. The room was ritually cleansed and all the Temple items were returned as was proper.

Worse, the Temple offerings had dropped to the point that the Levites had scattered out into the villages just so they could work and feed themselves. Only a few wealthy Levites could afford to stay in the city. Nehemiah forcefully demanded the offerings be restored rather like a Temple tax.

As he toured the countryside where the rest of the population lived, he saw a very degraded observance of the Sabbath. People were working, and vendors were selling. It was worse in the City than anywhere else. So Nehemiah personally saw to it the gates of the City were locked during the Sabbath. He also personally warned the vendors to stop coming on the Sabbath. It became a duty of the Levites to guard the city gates on the Sabbath.

A final issue was the dilution of Covenant identity. As with his previous visit, Nehemiah found that men were marrying pagan women without first converting them. He noted very loudly that this was the sin of Solomon. Worse, some of these men were raising children who didn’t even speak the Hebrew tongue. All of this was a serious violation of the Covenant Law, not to mention Imperial Law (see Esther 1). A man must rule his own household and his children speak his language.

It turns out that a primary reason Tobiah had been coming to visit was that Eliashib had married one of his sons to Sanballat’s daughter (Tobiah and Sanballat were close buddies). This priest was defrocked immediately when Nehemiah found out. Once more, everyone who refused to abide by the Covenant was kicked out the Covenant advantages, treated as a pagan and non-citizen.

******

We come to the end of our history survey. The final lesson in this series will not be linked to a particular Bible passage. Look for it in the next couple of days.

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It All Hangs on Shalom

Posted on April 23, 2021 by ehurst

Biblical Law makes it clear that decentralization is God’s requirement. When humanity flouts that requirement, God acts to dissolve the power that holds people together in fallen human purpose. This is the principle behind the Tower of Babel. God will never allow humanity to unite in a single controlling political and economic entity. Human unity without God is pure evil.

There are other divine moral restrictions on aggregation of power and money, but they address underlying assumptions that enable people to unite in sin. This includes the necessity of personal involvement, personal accountability, personal ownership of physical property. Virtual ownership through stock is inherently evil, as is virtual property, and virtual (fiat) currency. All of them together are designed to deprive people of God’s blessings. Those things are carefully structured to defraud and deprive, to disable the hand of God.

There’s not much we can do except pray and trust the Lord. You can’t even boycott the system in any meaningful way. So we wait on His wrath to do its work. In the meantime, it’s possible to know some of the names of those who stand in Nimrod’s place of guilt for building this Satanic empire aiming for a Tower of Babel. I read an attempt this morning to name names, but it’s so badly written I won’t link to it.

It’s not just the bad grammar, missing punctuation and verbal inconsistencies, though those were frustrating enough. It’s even more frustrating how close some people come to spilling the beans, yet their own blindness keeps them from seeing and revealing the whole picture. It’s one thing to come up short, but it’s another to cover up by misdirection. The information tends to be false in effect because it misses critical data.

So I’ll pass on this much: The incestuous ownership of stock allows big players to have their fingers in each other’s activities, so that everything you think you know about commerce is a big lie. For example, Coke and Pepsi seem major competitors, but when you work your way through all the proxies of stock investments, they are both owned by the same people. So it goes with virtually the entire gamut of international commerce, where the appearance of competing brands is a smokescreen for interlocking controls that serve only to plunder us all.

The writer used the image of flying to a vacation. The various airlines are all owned by the same small group of investment firms, though indirectly. It’s the same folks who own the petroleum refineries to make the jet fuel, the manufacturers of the aircraft, the metal producers going into the aircraft, and real estate and facilities at the destination and all of the entertainments you enjoy when you get there, along with the food and drinks.

The writer named BlackRock and Vanguard as the two single biggest institutional investors in global stocks and banking shares. Perversely, Vanguard owns a majority of BlackRock, and BlackRock owns a majority of Vanguard. You could have stock in each one, but your stock ownership is controlled through multiple layers of proxies, at every level of investment, until you discover that these two own the underwear covering your ass.

In all the intrigues and historical conspiracies, it’s been one team of the same folks against another team within the same elite society. At times it was the Vatican, then the Freemasons, then the Rothschilds, then some other bunch. None of them were good guys, but they always portray themselves as such. We could almost say that to organize is to surrender to Satan, because every time some group comes together to centralize and stabilize resources, it’s always evil, because it always dodges the requirements of Biblical Law.

The individual faces today you might recognize: Gates, Soros, the Clintons, etc., are just figureheads. It does little good to attack them directly. In another generation, it will be different faces, but the same evil power behind them. It’s part of The Cult I keep mentioning. For now, it’s BlackRock, Vanguard, Berkshire Hathaway, the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, The Open Society Foundation, along with Big Pharma, Big Media and Big Tech. For now, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is a major coordinator of all this. The names will change, but the purpose remains the same.

Every discrete exchange of fiat currency we can point to in the world today passes through the hands of Vanguard and BlackRock, in that they own the entire banking system of the entire world through stock proxies, etc. They are slowly seizing control over crypto-currencies. The flow is controlled by just a small group of people. The only thing they can’t touch is private exchange in barter, though they have laws on the books trying to restrict even that. These are the people threatened by the likes of a free market exchange in anything, but precious metals are a major threat to their control, because it’s a medium of exchange they can’t easily regulate, due to the natural limitations on enforcement.

This is why I say that there will be no uncontrolled economic collapse. It has been very carefully engineered, and it’s known by the nickname “The Great Reset.” It’s not merely some final act of plunder, but a removal of a great many layers of deception. They want to reduce the friction of cultural concepts like freedom and liberty. There will always be some level of false advertising necessary to manipulate even slaves, so it’s going to become totally naked tyranny. Still, they would get a bigger skim from the whole operation if they could reduce us to conscious awareness and acceptance of what they consider our proper fate.

And God laughs at all this.

This whole thing is one huge miscalculation. It will appear the work right up until the moment God wants to show His hand. The mechanisms will be varied and numerous, but we who are led by our hearts will recognize it’s His hand one way or another. No human action can save us. There is no human agency with clean hands to bring moral justice. It’s all hopelessly corrupt.

Once again, it throws you back upon your convictions. The only way you could possibly keep peace with God is to obey your mission and calling. Whether you understand the secret workings of human schemes won’t make much difference in the long run, except to help you see the glory of God’s justice. Our Father will build His hedge around the missions He gives to each of us. He will even grant us a lot of nonessentials, with an abundance that should awe us all. Still, He protects and provides what He calls us to do for His glory.

Don’t get hung up on the stuff. It’s meaning to you will change dramatically as the context moves through tribulation and wrath. Get hung up on shalom.

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