16 April 2022
Don't buy into the propaganda.
One of the things that seems most confusing to folks regarding my recent discussion of forgiveness is the definition of sin and evil. Those outside the Covenant do not define what is good or evil. Within the Covenant, God alone decides that. This is the whole point of the narrative of the Fall. Mankind does not defer to God in deciding what is good and what is evil, so it cannot comprehend.
Russia versus Ukraine: There are no good guys here. Neither side is a covenant nation. You see, in Scripture, God makes it quite clear that His Covenant is the definition of what makes both individuals and nations good or evil. The only remaining question for us is: Which is more harmful in the long run? Given that the Ukraine is a proxy for globalist ambitions to take over the whole human race, that's pretty harmful. Given that Russia is only trying to defend an oppressed minority living in the Ukraine, that's not nearly as harmful. It's not a good thing, but given the context of everybody living outside the Covenant, Russia's choice is less harmful.
The same can be said of the conflict in Myanmar. The so-called legitimate government was a globalist proxy -- very harmful. The junta is a nationalist government that is far less harmful. Neither is good, but the junta is better for the people in the long run, according to how the Bible teaches us to judge things. The harm they do is still less than the harm of living under a globalist government.
As I've often said here, conflict is native to the human condition. War is essential to the human experience. Any peace we might have outside the Covenant is guaranteed to be hateful and oppressive. It's not that war is better, but that peace is impossible by God's command. War is normal; take it for granted. Even under the Covenant, peace in this life will be relative, not total. It is utterly impossible to have peace among fallen humans without an overwhelming evil and oppression -- peace will never really be peace. The only true peace is peace with God, and that's on His terms. This is why Scripture invests so much effort in explaining how to handle the inevitable conflicts. Among fallen humans, peace means Satan devours souls, while war shines the light of limited hope. If you don't understand that, you'll never understand Scripture.
Get rid of the notion that death is such an awful thing. I realize Scripture uses the term "death" as a symbol for awful things. Yes, spiritual or moral death is very bad. But to then to turn around and act like the end of this life is the beginning of an even greater adventure is a way of mocking the fallen human fear of it. The Hebrew word "Sheol" has never been properly translated. That it is roughly equivalent to our term "the grave" does not deal with the fact that our language is based on a very pagan viewpoint.
Let me try; the term "Sheol" is symbolic. It refers to dying in ignominy. It's the bunker of Satan, a sad place. But Satan does not have any dominion in the afterlife, only in this fallen world. Sheol is not a reference to the afterlife so much as your earthly reputation after you pass. Death that comes in the process of faithful obedience to the Lord is glorious; it does not take you to Sheol.
Even saying that much is risky, because the whole discussion exceeds human knowledge. Still, the whole point is that Sheol broadly represents an ignoble death from our viewpoint as survivors. It's not that way in every use of the term where it appears in Scripture; Hebrew is flexible that way, whereas English is not. A western analysis of Hebrew will always miss the point. Still, the point stands: Those who walk in Covenant faithfulness have nothing to fear from death. It's just a scary but empty threat from Satan.
One of the biggest problems is that the bogus theology of evangelicals insists that death is such a bad thing because we didn't get a chance to "save" that person's soul before they died. That theology shreds Romans 8 and 9. There is not a single thing you could have done to change the eternal destiny of anyone. The best you could have hoped for was to help them find this life within the Covenant. Oh, but evangelicals don't teach the Covenant. That's too much like "under the law" in their minds. I've already dealt with that heresy elsewhere; the words "under grace, not under law" have been taken out of context.
So a scene of dead bodies scattered on the ground is not inherently awful. It's disgusting if you stand near a body that's been dead for a while, but you should take it in stride that warfare is going to generate a lot of dead bodies. It's sorrowful for their families, but otherwise doesn't mean much. It cannot mean much because the deceased means nothing to you unless you knew them personally. Thus, the death of strangers and their alleged value as "precious" becomes leverage to oppress other people. It's just an excuse to tell others how to live according to idolatrous values.
The real issue is whether their blood hit the ground justly. Without the Covenant, all death is unjustified. But one non-covenant death is no more evil than any other non-covenant death. Again, there are no good guys in any current warfare anywhere on the earth, because there is not a single Covenant government among men today. Every government is a hideous evil in God's eyes, and the US government is pretty much in the lead over all the rest. Only Covenant people can avoid blood-guilt.
Sinners are going to sin. That is, folks outside the Covenant have no righteousness at all in their lives. They cannot do good. There is a sense in which they can do things less harmful, but they cannot even understand that clearly. Standard cultural definitions of good and evil might overlap those of the Bible by accident here and there, but that makes no difference before the Lord. For a Covenant believer, all non-covenant lives are morally dead, so it's sadness across the board. As long as you have a visceral reaction to war and its products, you are still walking in the flesh, not in the Spirit of Christ.
Stop buying into the false assumptions of cultural propaganda. Let the officials and activists make all the noise they want; their concerns are defiled from the start. We are not party to any of these conflicts. The most we can do is try to assess which path is least harmful, and we dare not use any non-covenant frame of reference to discern things.
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