16 January 2022
God's wrath is wholly justified.
The whole point of the Law of Moses, and the Hebrew language in which it was published, is that you should read between the lines and try to understand the moral patterns. You could limit yourself to specific statements of divine policy, but if that's all you know, you really don't know anything at all.
Under the Covenant, the Lord intended that the entire nation of Israel regard themselves as one single family. As noted in a previous post, He demanded that this low-trust people embrace a high-trust moral standard for each other. Outsiders are expected to be predatory, but folks within the Covenant -- your "neighbors" by Covenant definition -- were held to a different standard. And it was painfully clear that if someone in your family was not enjoying a fair share of the family resources, there had to be a darned good reason they were excluded. Only if they threatened the shalom in certain critical ways could they be kept from enjoying the household wealth; it has to do with being accursed by God.
Naturally, the Pharisees had greatly extended their excuses for treating everyone but themselves as accursed. Thus, they rigged the system and heavily salted the community courts with their own kind. Then they willfully built up a set of precedents that gave them the edge in everything. How else can you explain the way they, as a third party to legal cases, managed to "legally" seize the property at dispute?
Jesus commented about this from time to time in His ministry, referring to "consuming widows' property" and similar rapacious acts. The whole point if talking about widows and orphans is that there was flatly not excuse at all for anyone in the Nation of Israel to lack sponsorship and protection from shepherd figures.
As always, this was not communism. This was feudalism. A primary mark of moral maturity in a society is that those with the greatest wealth and power were the first to embrace the unfortunate. This was fundamental to the culture of the entire Ancient Near East. People were always a sheikh's real treasure, and property was just a side-effect of good moral living. The reputation for protecting the weak was a primary feature of a sheikh's fame and glory. And in the back of every ruler's mind was supposed to be the realization that people were a trust from God.
It was assumed that those who embraced the weak and assumed responsibility for them would also find strong servants lining up to join their feudal domain. That's how they expected God to do things, and it is precisely what God promised. Perform your duty to the orphans and widows, and He would make sure to provide a mighty army to protect the domain.
The US makes a pretense of being "one American nation", but that has never been true except for the briefest moments during the Colonial Period. We've already highlighted how mixing cultures is a direct defiance of God. If you don't compel immigrants to assimilate fully, you have defied God's Law. Under Moses, this was accomplished by forcing resident alien nations to embrace the Code of Noah while living among them. We know for a fact the surviving Gibeonites and Jebusites adhered to this standard. But America has neglected this standard.
Worse, the US has specifically encouraged the abuse of the legal system and government policies to ensure a division between the people and rulers. There is a distinct enslavement of the citizens as if they were an unprivileged mass of conquered people. This is prohibited by God. In other words, it is Satanic. But then again, the US has never been a covenant nation, so no one is surprised.
What should God's Covenant People do? Unless you are under conviction to take up arms -- in which case you had better understand your obligation to slaughter the enemy without mercy -- there is a covenant path forward. It requires a significant tactical clout. There is a proper form of moral warfare, mostly using economics. It's not simple.
It would require a far stronger unity and purity in the Covenant body. It requires a minimal number of people to make it work, creating a community with some economic clout. More to the point, it must be a community large enough to survive with minimal economic links outside. In particular, the unity would need to be about the problem itself. It must be highlighted in clear terms of God's Law. Then it would require a high degree of economic sacrifice in anticipation that God would heal things later. It would mean reducing your economic activity and refusing participation in the system owned by the enemy. In our situation, it would mean a very concerted effort to get off-grid as much as possible and refusing to be bullied into joining the evil system.
Yes, that means no radio, TV, Internet, or even newspapers. It means reducing your activity to subsistence and as fully self-contained as possible. Use what you already have or can get with the most minimal contact. Most of all, you must make it clear to anyone who asks why you are doing this. You must be ready to testify what the Word of God says about all of this.
Yep, it's a tall order. Given that there are so few Covenant people in America today, this is the kind of thing you lift up to the Lord as things you will do as soon as He opens the door. You need to declare it and teach it as your ideal, and be actively preparing for God to make it come true somewhere in the future. You have to aim for this by faith, trusting the Lord to make it happen in His own good time.
Would you dare to pray toward this goal? Can you grasp the idea that this is more about holiness than practical success? Your host is already praying this way, hoping for the day the Lord will open the path to build a community that can reach for a higher level of holiness. I am seeking the Lord to provide more opportunity to withdraw from this evil world and to bring His name glory by how we can live by His Covenant. We must become a covenant nation.
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