Catacomb Resident Blog

It's Punishment

06 February 2022

It's the unconscious, a priori expectation people carry around that make God's revelation so hard to understand.

I've said it before: This world is supposed to suck. There is some mitigation possible in God's Word, but you first have to understand that this world cannot be made good. Everything we do that could mitigate our sorrows must be measures that take the focus away from this world. The only way to make the world a better place is to detach from it as much as possible. This is why the otherworldly orientation is fundamental to the gospel message.

You cannot save this world. It's doomed. Humanity was placed in this world as punishment for the Fall. The commands from God on how to live here do require accepting the necessity of punishment. You first have to embrace His judgment and wrath on sin, to include owning your own part in it. That means acknowledging that your life here should suck, at least in certain ways.

Thus, God's command for human existence after the Fall includes a certain kind of organization to life -- dispersed tribal feudalism -- that enables the good things He offers and gives structure to handling the bad things He insists we must face. It's not supposed to be easy in every way. This is why I've warned that human conflict is a necessity. Any effort to reduce the natural conflict between feudal tribal nations is sin in itself. There is only one brand of peace between humans allowed -- covenant communion. All other efforts are evil, because they inevitably mean defiling yourself and the world as a whole.

One of the things Satan tries hard to sell is centralization. But even that is not so simple as a blanket prohibition. The Bible assumes that some nations will rise and oppress others. That's just built into our human existence. There are clear rules on how to go about doing that with God's tolerance. There's also nothing particularly wrong with absorbing conquered peoples, but again, there are fairly specific rules for that, too. Rather, it is utterly wrong to build an empire that does only a half-assed job that ignores the rules and misses the point.

When you absorb other nations, you must make them your own children. They must voluntarily accept it as individuals, and they must embrace it with a totality that makes them indistinguishable from the existing population. It means embracing a new identity and rejecting the old one; they must leave behind everything they had before. You cannot do this to whole nations; it must be completely individual, so that each is judged for their successes and failures as individuals, the way the rest of existing population is. Once they build a separate identity, they are no longer your people, but an enemy nation.

Barring individual assimilation, they remain a subject nation. You cannot touch their culture and language, but you can require them to learn yours as a second language. You cannot touch their daily lives; they must remain under the guidance and rule of their own. You hold their rulers accountable, not the individual people. The only thing you can do is require them to contribute resources (tribute) and perhaps bodies for military service. Again, you must take in their existing military organization and not dissolve their national identity and organization. Give them training if they want it, but don't require their troops to become an integral part of your military individually. Don't mix disparate troops into the same formation. They keep their leaders, their formations and capabilities. If you can't integrate them as a whole into your battle plans, don't use them at all.

That's just a sample. My point here is that we need to get used to God's ways. Don't mix populations with different cultures and customs; that is anathema. It's all or nothing.

And that means getting used to His limits on what we can expect from this life. The surface of the planet is highly variable, and so are the varied races that came into existence in all the different places. God Himself sponsors that variation, and you do not touch it. Humans are inherently and utterly incapable of coming up with a culture that fits all the variations. God demands a proliferation of cultures and languages, and the very idea of unifying humanity is forbidden.

It's this overwhelming hubris of humanity to collect the world under one government that guarantees God's wrath. It's one thing to have treaties that allow commerce; it's another thing to regulate with penalties. There can be no single body judging such things -- it's an abomination to God. It must remain subject to negotiation at all times. In other words, nationalism as a human urge comes from God Himself. We are obliged to honor it and even promote it as a human tendency.

The very idea of seeking world peace is from Satan. Regional alliances are suspect.

Because of our human tendency to ignore the multi-generational viewpoint, humans typically fail to see how God's wrath works against such things. The harder we fight His will to insist on doing what we want, the greater will be our fall when He takes it all down. This is why we should hardly be surprised that God is planning to use a micro-nova to destroy our current feeble efforts at global civilization. It's another Tower of Babel. You could say He saw globalism coming and put things in place to deal with it appropriately. His wrath has already begun falling, according to His divine wisdom regarding what it would take to give us a fair chance to respond justly.

No, He is not going to leave us alone to fester in our sins. He's going to keep poking and prodding and shattering anything that goes too far. He decides what "too far" means. It's His Creation, and His ideas are the definition of what is in our best interest. We are inherently wrong about what is even possible, so we must accept His discipline. In His mercy, He has granted us a clear revelation of how to get out of this mess. Getting out of this mess means taking His advice on how to deal with it while we are in it.

His advice is to embrace the otherworldly viewpoint that this life isn't worth that much worry. The only success possible in this world is changing your attitude and embracing His ways.


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