23 December 2022
Caveat: What follows is based on the current context. Jesus made it clear that His Father's will includes recognizing priorities, thus His teaching about Sabbath observance relative to other obligations. We need to understand God's Law that way, as a reflection of His divine moral character, the will of a living Person, not some iron writ. With the depth and breadth of defilement in our world today, things will be different than when people tend to be closer to the Code of Noah.
The primary point here is that we hold ourselves separate from the world around us because God does. The Covenant is a radical change in identity. You are no longer a part of any man-made society. And the worse sin gets in our world, the greater our consciousness of separation must be. I realize how very hard it is to make that clean break, but it's necessary. God makes a solid distinction in how He treats His Covenant children versus how He treats everyone else. He's directly involved in our affairs, but the rest of the world is under Satan's dominion.
We would like to see a high ethical standard in the world around us. However, we also recognize that ethics are not good enough for us, not flexible enough. So we encourage ethics for them, but not for ourselves. You need ethics and strict accountability for people who have no inner spiritual and moral guidance. This is where the business of "under grace, not under law" comes into play. People who do not have grace must have law, instead.
We still need to know law, because that's what we are forced to give everyone who rejects grace. All of the people around you need some kind of holiness from you, and it needs to be the holiness they recognize. It's a tough balancing act to talk about grace and then be compelled to act by law with the majority of the people you encounter. It requires recognizing divine priorities and being able to tell people: I can give you grace or give you the law, but not both.
Even harder is that it comes with a sliding scale between grace and law on a great many issues. That's where the priorities become important. You cannot afford to oversimplify your convictions. Some people the Lord demands you work a little harder to reach, some play along the boundaries, and the others will remain faceless background. It's not a question of what they are, but what role they play in your service to the Kingdom of Heaven. You need to understand what they are for you. This is why you must get a sense of your personal domain granted from God. If He places someone inside your boundaries, it's your job to handle the complexities of when they stand in grace and when they have slipped into the territory of law.
Everything outside of the Covenant boundaries is under His Law Code. Do you understand that Satan is bound by the Law Code of the Covenant? There are different categories under his dominion, and we need to have a sense about that, but the Law Code does restrict what he can do, so you need to understand how it works. There are a great many lies about what Satan can do in this world, and too many people are making those things true for themselves because they don't understand that it's all lies. It's their own power keeping them enslaved. Their perception of reality is badly broken, but reality is giving them what they really want.
That's a lesson of grace: If you stop believing the lies, then you are free to receive the Father's blessings. Satan's "paycheck" is keeping our blessings from us by his lies. It's not that Satan has no power, but that it is rather strictly limited more than most people understand.
In that sense, we cannot change someone else's reality. They are locked under whatever binds them internally. It's certainly possible for the Father to grant us authority to help them find release, but only your convictions can tell you where that boundary line is at any given moment. I can assure you that the Charismatics are wrong in their doctrines of taking authority over demons; they make it too formalized and categorical. It's not about rules, but about the living power of our Father's grace and mercy. Your personal authority will vary from what He grants others. A major element in miracles and deliverance is the war between whose version of reality wins, and how God breaks the bondage of satanic lies.
During these evil times, God's Law Code will dominate our awareness, simply because far more of the broader human experience is outside of His grace. I noted in my previous post that very soon a majority of the human race will die, and that's partly because they have all fled His grace. The miracles and blessings will appear totally random; they are unable to perceive the pattern in spiritual matters. The foundation of that pattern is understanding the imperatives of the Father's glory. Whatever that demands is what shall be. If I try to talk about it in words, I'm obliged to speak in terms of probabilities, because nothing in grace is certain on our end, but His glory is always certain.
If you are reluctant to end this life, then you already don't understand enough. If you cannot distinguish between the will of the flesh and the will of your heart/spirit, then you will struggle. The Father never fails to tell us what He's up to with our lives, but we can easily fail to be in a position to hear what He's saying about it.
The biggest problem is our mental reflex to include ourselves in with all the people outside the Covenant boundaries. They are not us; we are not part of them. What we give in grace to our covenant brothers and sisters is not what we give to those outside the Covenant. Do not throw pearls to the swine. Don't hate them, but be aware that their nature is still seriously defiled.
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