08 November 2021
The logic of the Covenant is revealing God's moral character.
Creation itself is God's personal hobby. Its design naturally reflects His personality. His moral character is reflected in very detail. If you get to know Him personally, everything you experience makes perfect sense in your heart, if not in your mind. Your fallen fleshly nature rejects revelation, so there's no surprise that God's character is hard to grasp intellectually, but if you carry the focus of your conscious awareness in your heart, then you'll understand just fine. The heart is where you find your convictions and faith, the things God gave you so you can walk according to His will. Thus, your faith/convictions always lead you to His will, while your intellect will always lead you away from it.
There was an implicit covenant in God placing Adam and Eve in the Garden. They had a mission and it was to assert the character of God in His Garden. They had tremendous power and authority that we cannot imagine. They traded that privileged position for a mortal existence. The natural world didn't change; we did. Now, instead of an instinctive heart-borne knowledge of God's character, we see clearly that Adam and Eve no longer understood how to meet with God. They hid out from Him. Nothing had changed excerpt their perception of things.
They were now no different from the natural world they previously managed for God. They feared Him in a way that was not consistent with His design for them. Their consciences were inflamed with an undeniable sense that they had betrayed His trust. It so consumed them that they couldn't even put on a good act to meet with Him as usual. They had died, in a sense. So they got booted out of the Garden. But then, the gate remained. The only way for them to pass back through that gate was to pass the Flaming Sword.
The Flaming Sword is a common image for God's revelation. It's nature is to kill our sinful nature. It burns brightly with the truth of God, and cuts cleanly between fallen nature and what God designed for us to have (Hebrews 4:12). It restores us to our divine privileges.
That Flaming Sword has always been in the form of a Covenant. It restores the relationship we should have with God. It's not just being in the Garden, but communion with Him in that Garden. Creation itself is feudal in design, because that's the character of the Creator. Thus, the Creator offers to restore us via a feudal covenant of adoption, bringing us into His household as family. Having tasted the Fall, Covenant is now the only way back into the Garden, back to the status of things God intended.
Covenant is essentially a matter of boundaries. That accurately slicing blade removes from us all the things our rational minds and emotions can dream up to please the fallen nature, and leaves only that which pleases the Creator. The Hebrew concept of holiness is separation. To be holy and acceptable to Him, we must slice off the human tendencies that don't reflect His character. We must nail our fleshly nature to the Cross; the Cross and Flaming Sword have the same effect. They both execute the Covenant by which we are restored to the Garden. The Garden has boundaries.
So, after you come to the realization that you are part of God's Elect, your duty is to restore those boundaries in your own life. Over and over again, the boundaries do not have to meet the tests of logic. It has to settle in your heart as the truth of who you were meant to be. You must conform your life to those boundaries. Yes, the flesh is kicking and screaming, and even God knows you won't succeed in detail, but what He really wants is your desire. You must migrate your conscious awareness into the part of you where He lives, where your faith and convictions reside. You must learn to see the intellect as fallen and untrustworthy, and that it is not you. It is something separate and requires discipline. Your mission is to drag that damned part of you through life until God says you've accomplished the mission, and you can abandon it for Heaven.
The stupidest thing you could possibly do is subject those boundaries to tests of reason. That's simply trying to submit God to the fleshly nature. That's making yourself your own god. Your fallen mind and fleshly desires are not capable of meeting God on His own level. Only your heart and spirit can go there. The mind cannot be redeemed; it can only be disciplined to the point it gets used to obeying the voice of God in your heart.
The written covenant in the Bible is not a stack of rules. It wasn't written as one; that's foreign to the Hebrew language. It was an image painted on the canvas of human existence meant to acquaint your mind to God. Your mind cannot possibly look upon His face; it would die if it did. Instead, there is a moderated image offered so that the fleshly mind can learn to recognize God and His actions. The heart can know Him personally, but the mind cannot. It can know only what it can know, and it's not designed to live on into eternity.
The written covenant approximates God's nature in limited terms. It is not God Himself. It is the path to awakening in your soul the recognition of Him. So the task upon redemption in Christ is to go back and reclaim what it was the Law Code was meant to do for Israel. You have to understand the context and the people, and then extrapolate. But that extrapolation must come via the heart, and into the mind from a higher plane. It will always be contextual in the mind, but the mind is able to discern a pattern, if you can discipline it enough. That pattern is not God, but is an approximation that reduces the tension between what typically is and what should be.
At this point, I cannot "lay down the law" for you. I can only report what my convictions tell me. The point of teaching and prophesying is to provoke your own examination of convictions. My mission from God is to stand up for all the world to see a declaration of conviction and faith, not so you can copy it, but to indicate something of the process God requires of each of us. Obedience is entering the process. There is no outcome until you die, so we don't pretend we can nail it down for everyone for all time. What I'm trying to get you to see is the necessity of the process. That's what Covenant means. You are nailing your fleshly nature to the Cross over and over again, because you keep discovering yet one more issue that is not yet subjected to divine revelation. The process never ends.
Let me encourage you to set your feet on the journey that ends in death at the Gate of Eden. Let's restore the meaning of the Covenant.
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