12 April 2023
The gospel is not data. It's not a proposition; the gospel is a Person. In order to fulfill the Great Commission you must introduce people to your feudal Master. They need to know something about Him from what you can say and do. Your memorized "plan of salvation" is just a manipulative sales pitch. You must become a fresh incarnation of the Savior, as close as you can.
You must get to know Him personally. That's a tall order because He was a Hebrew guy who lived 2000 years ago. I'll grant you He was under Judean legal authority, as a subject kingdom of Rome, but under the more common definition of "Jew", Jesus was not one of them. The Crucifixion was a public rescission of whatever Jewish identity He had. But there is no disputing that He was a Hebrew man.
From as far back as Mount Sinai, the name "Israel" referred to the nation under the Covenant. However, the label "Chosen" was not coterminous. Paul said in Galatians that it was never really a matter of DNA; that's just flesh and results in slavery. It was a matter of Abraham's faith, not his genes that passed on the Covenant. In the end, that Covenant was summed up in Jesus as their Messiah, and the ongoing ethnic identity of Jews became a dead end. Only those in Christ can claim the name "Chosen".
And to be in Christ means to walk in His Covenant. To "make disciples" means teaching His Covenant. I'll grant you Paul and his coworkers didn't use that terminology among the Gentiles scattered across Asia Minor and Europe. Those people had no background in covenants; it was an eastern concept. To be more precise, it was Ancient Near Eastern.
God built the nation of Israel from scratch. Abraham was called an Aramean, but that meant only that he spoke the language and manifested the cultural background that went with it. For all our best efforts, we cannot pin down an ethnic identity for the "Arameans" of the Ancient Near East. It refers only to any people who spoke the language and lived with the culture. And while Aramaic was one of the most practical written and spoken languages, used by a great many nations as the preferred second language, the language of trade and treaty, it remained eastern in the sense that it was mostly symbolic. Many of the root words stand on ceremonial or protocol uses, full of metaphor and drama. The language itself is mostly symbolic.
Other languages in the Ancient Near East were even more symbolic. That was how people communicated back then, because it was how they thought. All the more so when they discussed anything really important, such as dealing with gods. We see almost no mention of Heaven in the Old Testament. That's because they would not have presumed to try describing anything in the Spirit Realm. Thus, there is very little discussion of the afterlife, except in symbolic terms.
When Alexander the Great marched through the Levant, his Hellenistic mythology denied the existence of a Spirit Realm. The gods were in this realm, just invisible unless they wanted to be seen. There was no spirit in humans to reanimate a dead body, no identity that continued after death. It made it hard for Paul and his coworkers to teach about that kind of thing. It wasn't unheard of -- the Mediterranean Basin was full of eastern religions -- just not a common belief among the Greek intelligentsia.
So, when they took the gospel message across that part of the world, we see mention of Jesus and His feudal Lordship, a much more common notion to Gentiles. When any Gentile asks about "how to be saved" it referred to the life they live here. How am I supposed to live in this world; how do I make peace with your God? Most of the New Testament letters address that question, and really say very little about going to Heaven.
That's because "eternal life" as is commonly used among church folks refers to something only God can give. This was a fundamental Hebrew conception. To the degree the rest of the Ancient Near East thought about an afterlife, it referred to something ineffable. For Greeks, it was just an extension of this life, but for the eastern folks it simply could not be told because it belonged to a higher realm that no one could describe without symbolism.
So we end up with a New Testament that says there are some people who are eternal beings, but dragging around a fleshly nature, as a form of punishment. You don't "get saved" in that sense; spiritual birth is not a space-time event. You were eternal before you were born. What happens is that you discover this and connect to your eternal nature. At the same time, there is obviously a much larger group of people who are flesh alone. The only indicator we have is how they live this life.
Over and over again, the New Testament says you don't live by the Covenant to win eternal life. Rather, you live the Covenant because you have eternal life. Eternal folks alone have the power to do it. People can fake it to some degree, and maybe for a while, but in the long run they will manifest their lack of spiritual power. They will depart because they were never one of us.
So we don't evangelize spiritual birth; only God can do that. We evangelize the Covenant life of being like Christ. We act as much like Him as we can, given the incessant resistance of our fleshly nature. He died on the Cross voluntarily; He is the personification of sacrificial love. It's not that He was never prickly when the moment called for it, but only because that was His compassion in disguise. It put the other person in a place to hear the message. He was trying to reach those His Father had given Him.
When Jesus taught about the Bread of Life, He knew it would drive away the folks His Father had not given Him (at least, had not given them yet). People who were ready to start following Him would not be put off by the symbolism. Even if their minds were not fully aware of what Bread of Life meant, their hearts knew. We are forever trying to discern how God wants us to act to ping the hearts of people who don't realize they have one. We must at every moment of every day be ready for the most audacious things He wants us to say and do. He doesn't need our help, but He wants to include us in His miracles of touching hearts. So, we must remain sensitive in our hearts (the repository of our convictions) to the moment.
It's not a matter of what the other person might need, but what God says He wants from you. He can save anyone He wants, but He's trying to bring us along. That's how He chooses to do things in this world. He calls His children into a covenant community so outsiders can see that sacrificial love. That's our primary witness. If you aren't ready to carry your Cross to get someone else to see Him, then you aren't much use. That tends to put you outside the Covenant, and outside the covering of the Lord.
I've shared the Lord of the Covenant with a lot of people in my life. Most didn't respond right away. Of those who responded at all, most did so after some days of exposure, at the least. Some took years. My duty has always been to remain consistent as the gospel measures such things. That meant loving a lot of very unlovely folks. That was the only way, because I have no idea who is going to respond. I assure you over half were people I didn't expect to say anything at all about it, while a lot of people I considered targets never responded at all. Virtually everyone who responded asked me about it.
So target everyone in your path. You cannot know who is watching and sensing that call. You don't have to play whatever game everyone else is playing; you have no obligation to meet their expectations. What you must do is be consistent with the gospel by its own internal definitions. You must be ready to sacrifice for every fool you encounter. Not everything; sacrifice only those things the Lord gave you to share. Draw the boundaries. Don't worry about the consequences. Meet them where they are, in the sense of however close you can get and keep a clear conscience.
Most people are going to end up suffering life and death outside the Covenant. There's nothing we can do to change that. But some of them are supposed to escape, and we are supposed to find them. We find them wherever the Lord tells us to go. We find them first and foremost by acting according to our best reception of His teachings. When the times comes, we might say something. It must fall in the context of what we have already demonstrated.
Demonstrate the compassion that nailed Jesus to the Cross.
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