26 September 2022
The Kingdom of Heaven is rooted in Heaven, not on the earth. It is in the world, but not of the world. This world is just a big lie; it is not ultimate reality. It is slated for destruction. Almost nothing that happens here matters, except to the degree anything touches on the glory of our Creator. The Lord will remember everything we do to reflect His glory, and won't forget the sins of those who defile it. Meanwhile, every human accomplishment will be wiped away when Christ returns. He will restore this world to what it was before the Fall.
What we do here for the Father's glory must stand on His revelation. It cannot be subject to human logic. We must ignore human reason in the final analysis of what we must do to obey the Lord. The Word of God sets boundaries for us. It comes to us as an Ancient Near Eastern covenant; Jesus the Messiah was a Hebrew man preparing the world for a restoration of covenant life under a new covenant. That covenant is His will for us today in Christ, and it retains the ancient form of tribal feudalism. Without this covenant in its Ancient Near Eastern form and implications, you cannot claim to be following Jesus Christ.
That covenant is fundamentally mystical and otherworldly. It presumes to engage our eternal natures and is at war with our fleshly natures. The fleshly nature is inherently fallen and cannot be saved; it will die and nothing from it will see the Resurrection. The whole of the New Testament keeps talking about how we must bind the flesh under our spiritual nature. It talks about how we cannot trust the intellect and reason of our fleshly nature, but that we must center our conscious awareness in our hearts, not our heads.
With that foundation, it makes perfect sense that we don't invest too much energy and resources into worldly affairs. We are warned repeatedly that human aspirations are not from God, and that human politics cannot possibly represent God's will, unless the whole thing is subjected to His Covenant. It's not just a matter of obedience in the flesh. The Covenant is founded on certain assumptions about feudal commitment to the Lord of Glory; that's what I published in my Code of Noah HOWTO. Unless your human political entity is wholly subjected to the Code of Noah, then God is not involved directly. It does not honor Him and belong to Him, so His actions with that political entity are handled by Satan.
Satan is His servant; he is not in rebellion any longer. Satan has dominion over this fallen world. He is called the prince of this world, the Prince of the Power of the Air (a reference to human breathing). God retains the final prerogative to insert Himself into human politics, but has clearly warned that He will not bring His miracles to bear in a human situation that excludes His Covenant. The basis for God offering a real-world practical redemption is the Covenant, and only under the Covenant. Given that no political entity is based on any covenant, all human government is under Satan's dominion.
Stop for a moment and consider what that requires of us. If we know that Satan is lord over everyone who isn't under the Covenant, then it should say a lot about how we should expect things to go.
That does not prohibit us from engaging human governments, but it does restrict that engagement. Our only interest is promoting the Covenant, and we already know that human government has no clue about that. So our interaction is inherently cynical -- we don't expect much in the way of goodness. Any blessing that comes through human government is purely incidental, and government officials have no clue about actual good versus evil. So we should be aware of what human government does and what it cares about, but never take it very seriously.
Instead, we play along because we have more important things to concern us. And we have no doubt that, sooner or later, we won't be able to play along with government demands on us. At some point, we'll have to reject human authority in favor of what the Covenant requires. We will endure the government's wrath because we already know it would do the same to Jesus, and He refused to get involved in changing human politics.
If you imagine that human accomplishments and temporal outcomes matter, then you are a damned fool. Those things do not reflect the glory of our Lord. The ancient Hebrew outlook Jesus held included the idea that obedience itself matters, not practical outcomes. There's nothing wrong with being aware of probabilities in worldly outcomes, but there is something very wrong with imagining that they have anything to do with our Father's reputation.
What man can accomplish by any means is here today and gone tomorrow. It will be forgotten.
Obey your convictions, but don't let them blinded by false assumptions about the nature of things. Never invest your hopes in human outcomes. That in itself is one of Satan's biggest lies. He lures us into engaging the folly of human aspirations, as if they matter.
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