31 December 2021
Following Christ means holding no loyalty to any human government.
Embracing the Covenant means rejecting any human political stance. You could claim to love the people and hold some level of civil obligation, but you cannot be a patriot in the typical sense of defending the system of government. The secular State has been the enemy of Christ since before its birth. While that doesn't require you to resist all government policy, it requires that you take the position of playing along for the sake of tactics as one who will always be a resident foreigner.
In case you haven't been paying attention, Lincoln's propaganda statement about "government of the people, by the people, for the people" was a lie when he uttered it. It was a lie as soon as the Constitution was ratified. That was not a good faith effort; it was a subterfuge from the start. All you have to do is think about where it got us today. If the system was not sufficient to keep things sane with the people we have had, then it was not the right constitution. The current situation with all its horrors is proof that it was a bad system.
Ideals that pretend to uphold a high standard, demanding the people rise to the call, is riddled with false notions about human nature. There is no power in intellectual ideals; they are not a deity of some kind. The only power to move fallen mankind is the Holy Spirit, and He had nothing to do with democratic or republican ideas. If the people's vote was such a good idea, why did Jesus refuse to be made king in John 6? It was certainly the will of the people.
The will of the people has always been filling their bellies, as Jesus pointed out. Then He went on to raise a holy standard of understanding things with parables, and they rejected His message. They kept thinking with their bellies when He said, "I am the Bread of Life." He noted that it was impossible for people to be talked or reasoned into righteousness. Only those whom the Spirit moves can walk in God's truth. Everyone else will reject it.
The gospel message is of necessity a minority truth. Jesus warned that the Kingdom way was hard, like a steep mountain path with narrow spots, that few would even want to try. Paul warned that the flesh cannot even desire redemption. The implication is that it cannot be made universal; that was the ultimate failure of the Covenant of Moses. It was divine truth revealed in a form anyone could grasp, and it was rare when a simple majority of the nation of Israel even wanted to understand it, much less obey it.
Your host does not expect a significant positive response to the message on this blog. At most, it will remain a thin minority of people who are able to walk this path. It's not meant to be elitist; it's wide open to anyone who wants it. The problem is that it's hard, so most people refuse to try it.
It's not easy to reject the entire range of Western Civilization. It's not easy to assert that human reason is inherently damned and damning, especially when human reason is the false god that the West worships first. Further, our message has faced the strongest hostility from church folks, the ones who claim Christ without a clue to the path where He leads. Genuine faith in a very real covenant threatens their comfort zone.
Our path is not austere, but it does reject the human-centric standard. Fallen man is not the measure of things. Christ on the Cross is the measure; He went there as a rejection of His human mortality.
So when we survey the events around us, we cannot accept any proposal that is merely reasonable. We stand for the divine revelation in the Covenant. We embrace the boundaries that only divine power can enable us to obey. We don't embrace anything that rests on human capabilities. It's not a question of talent, but of spiritual power to move the heart.
We aren't interested in New Year's resolutions. Some random day on a man-made calendar makes no difference to Eternity. We know that we will spend the rest of our lives seeking a growing conformance to the boundaries of conviction.
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