21 October 2021
Sometimes you need to pull back and see the outline of the whole in order to understand all the details.
We are in a time of tribulation; the Lord is pouring out His wrath on the USA. Naturally, this is because of the horrific sins of this country. It's not hard to pin down most of those sins as rising from a bad culture, one that rejects the revelation of God. Worse, this culture is committing the sin of Jeroboam: raising up a false god and calling it "Christ." The US wallows in pagan evil but insists that this is "Christian."
It's bad enough that we have a host of residents who flatly reject Christ. There's nothing we can do for them but testify of our Lord. The problem is that those who are supposed to testify aren't telling the truth. Just what does it mean to "follow Christ"? There is simply not enough distinction between those who claim Christ and those who reject Him. What we have is the Harlot Church riding the Beast.
The Lord has commissioned me to call attention to this. To make this work, a major element of my mission is explaining the biblical model. There's a vast wealth of scholarship on which my contention rests. As you might expect, most of that scholarship stands outside the mainstream religious system. But there's plenty of crap in that outside scholarship, too. How do we wade into this so that we end up pleasing the Savior?
The issue in serving Christ has always been the same throughout the Bible: commit to the Creator and learn to love Him as a real person. It's called "faith." And the New Testament flatly states what the Old Testament often implied: You cannot come to Him unless you are called. You will not seek Him unless you belong to Him in the first place. We will never understand why He divided the world this way, but humanity is clearly two different kinds of creature living side-by-side. Most do not belong to Him, but a few of us do.
Again, there is no way we'll understand that with our human capabilities. Nonetheless, the focus for what we can do is carry on the ways of His people while living among those who are not His people. The whole purpose is His glory. Boosting His glory is in the best interest of all Creation. That's hard-wired into Creation itself.
A critical element in living like His people is that we learn to live and work together in the power of His Spirit, overcoming all the very real human factors driving us apart. It's a paradox: We must live like family where there is little to no actual kinship. We must overcome the physical and fleshly nature to embrace the divine nature. It was never about shared DNA, but always a matter of spiritual DNA. We are chosen and called; we have no choice but to work together for His glory. This is the only way He will have it.
So the only question that remains is the mechanics of how we do that. Obviously there has to be some limits; it's not possible on this earth for us all to live together in one place if we are going to present a witness to all of humanity across the globe. The Tower of Babel makes the sharp point that we must be dispersed in tiny tribal communities with significant variations among us. So whatever it is we do must meet that requirement as the norm.
On top of all that, the mission is not saving the world. This world is slated for destruction, so whatever it is we are building, it's not a better world. Rather, we are building a better existence in this awful world. We are building a testimony, not by our accomplishments, but by our conduct on the path to leaving this world. It's our whole purpose to make ourselves intolerable to a world system that hated our Lord.
All we are building is that distinction between His people and those who are not His people.
From time to time, the Lord will bring His wrath on those who are not His people. To some degree, you and I as His people must suffer the same sorrows so the world will see how we handle it. Yet, in order to have a testimony, the Lord says that, at the same time, He will distinguish us by a measure of relief. The life we live is more consistent with the design of Creation, so there has to be some visible difference in outcomes. His revelation promises some measure of blessings that will characterize His people. But then again, not all of those blessings are visible to worldly minds. The whole thing remains a paradox throughout. We must learn to recognize the full range of those blessings, both the obvious and those more subtle and otherworldly, and celebrate them.
A critical element in savoring His largess is how we use it. We must learn to see ourselves as a small part of a very long stream of revelation. We must become His revelation, because His true revelation has always been a living thing. We are accountable to His divinely inspired written revelation, but the whole point is to make us the true revelation, to become divinely inspired people. Christ is the final and ultimate revelation, and it is the writing that descends from Him. He is not built on the writing, but it is built on Him. So we must become like Him in breathing life into revelation.
He grants us the blessings of His promises in this life for one primary purpose: to invest in the moral infrastructure of a community of faith. The trappings of community -- the places, the organization, the stuff we use -- are not the thing itself. It is actually not even the people, when it comes down to it. Rather, it is the manifestation of His divine Presence in our lives together. We must do things His way in all contexts.
His way includes a lot of things you don't see in the mainstream religious institutions of the USA. His ways include Eastern feudal organization, a tribal identity that separates us from the rest of the country, a high level of communal living and sharing property, and a lot of other things completely foreign to churchians in America. These things are prerequisites. Without these things, we have no witness, because there is no foundation for building one.
So, as you might expect, a large share of my ministry output is pointing out those things so utterly foreign to churchians. Everything instructive in the written Word presumes that His people will live together in a feudal tribal extended family household. Until you get that part right, you cannot claim to be following Christ. Those are critical foundational elements of the concept of "church." You'll hear a lot of this from me until it becomes your natural assumption.
I can't make anyone do anything. All I can do is witness of the truth He has given me. If it doesn't stir recognition in your convictions, then just ignore this noise. But if something in my words stirs your faith, you become accountable to Christ for investigating and obeying. All I'm trying to do is to get you back on track to that one glorious exit from this awful world that brings you back to Eden.
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