21 April 2023
Let's end this series with a definitive statement.
It's so consistent throughout the New Testament that you wonder why everyone misses it: Love your covenant brothers and sisters. It's not that we never care about anyone else, but that we recognize the boundaries of the Covenant. The term "love your neighbor" has been twisted out of shape, because in English, your "neighbor" is whomever lives near you. In Hebrew society, Gentiles were not allowed to live next door. They were outsiders who were required to live outside the covenant covering. Only when they submitted to the Covenant in one way or another could they live among the Covenant people. The only proper understanding of "love your neighbor" is that you treat covenant folk as family, but not outsiders. You must honor the Covenant boundaries.
Our situation is reversed; we are the wanderers sojourning among outsiders. Wherever the Israelis went, the Covenant required them to cloister together and not assimilate. Mixing with the Gentiles was a primary threat of defilement. That hasn't changed; it carried over to the New Covenant. We don't mix with those who don't hear the Good Shepherd's voice. We cling to His people.
We can't avoid doing business with outsiders, and it's no longer a matter of refusing to eat under the same roof (a matter of ritual), but the underlying wariness against defilement is still there. The main point is that we don't make common cause with their worldly concerns. We do not engage in efforts to change worldly outcomes. Rather, we trust in the Lord.
Yes, the Old Covenant Israel did at times take actions in their world to secure their divine inheritance from God. They always acted based on commands from God; they always sought Him first. Otherwise, they always failed. Do not act on your human instincts about problems in this life. Call on God. His answers are the only ones that work. But Israel had to act as a Covenant Nation, and it had to be something that related to a valid Covenant priority.
We have virtually no experience with this in America, because Americans by and large refuse to recognize the necessity of the Covenant. They have always blithely assumed that the Devil can't touch "good people" -- and the definition of human goodness is just whatever human reason might discern. This is the very essence of the Fall. Americans have seized upon random events as a sign of God's favor, when none of it matches the Covenant revelation.
To be "in Christ" means to be under the Covenant, to hear the Shepherd's Voice the way the Good Samaritan did, not the way the priest and Levite acted. You will not receive the promises of God outside the Covenant. This is so alien to American thinking that we have all kinds of people claiming God's promises, while receiving the counterfeits supplied by the Devil. We have no idea, no legacy and lore of what it means to walk in the New Covenant.
And because of this, we have zero grounds for evaluating the situation in our world. God acted in the history of Israel to protect His Covenant. The people got that protection only if they were under the Covenant covering. All other events were random and controlled by Satan for his purpose of deception and enslavement. Americans at large are enslaved to the Devil -- all of them -- except for a tiny few who have begun to rediscover the Covenant.
Until we invest some time and resources in breathing life into the Covenant boundaries, we have no expectation of God speaking to us about what we can do to receive His Covenant promises. It's not that we are forbidden to act, but that we cannot know what actions are part of God's plan until we submit to that plan, sight unseen. And the hardest thing for Americans to get is that the plan is for covenant folks in community, not individuals wandering alone.
Your mainstream tax-exempt church is not a covenant community. It fails all the important tests of covenant identity. There may well be a covenant community within the church organization, but the institution itself is not one. As long as the focus is the institution, the community is hindered.
Your testimony is how you love your covenant brothers and sisters. Only as a subsidiary of that can we can talk a little about how we love those outside the Covenant. We have no clue what covenant love looks like because nobody does it. The foundation is missing. God wants us to have our own experiential legacy of Covenant living; this is how He does things. How do folks from an American background do Covenant? We don't know yet.
So, any action we might propose to help the rest of the world see His truth is going to be wrong no matter what we do, simply because we aren't building on the foundation our Lord requires. Notice what I've written in this series. I haven't said you cannot get involved in human political wrangling, only that you cannot do so righteously until you are working from the foundation of a covenant community. We cannot speak to the American political and social condition until we have the voice that comes from covenant experience.
I can write, day after day, struggling to point to the Covenant, but unless someone actually touches it, my words are just a generic urging. I can tell you only what I would do, and that might not work for you. There is no record of American covenant life that I can point to for reference. We all need to get our butts in gear and start doing the Covenant.
Until we do, our God-glorifying involvement in society won't happen.
End of series
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