22 April 2023
Like the old hymn says, "faith is the victory". The power inside of you to live out a radical commitment to following Jesus is its own reward. The Covenant is not law as we think of it in our English language. The Covenant is privilege. When you start thinking like that, you will know your heart has conquered your brain.
On the one hand, I've done what I could to help identify the sources of sorrow in our world. It doesn't hurt to nail down who is doing what in service of Satan's agenda. On the other hand, it doesn't really matter that much who Satan is using to deceive us and draw us out of the Covenant camp. We must understand what the deception itself is. The best way to guard against counterfeits is to start with making sure you really understand the real thing.
The problem is that the final details of the real thing for you will vary from what the real thing might be for me. Half of divine revelation is written in your convictions. You must awaken them and invest yourself in exploring them in order to know how to walk in faith. The western obsession with uniformity is a lie from Hell. It's one thing for everyone in a single household to dress alike and eat the same food and use the same expressions. It's another thing to realize that the Covenant intentionally avoids nailing down those details, and folks on the other side of the world obeying the same Covenant will look and sound different.
We don't have the cultural foundation for reading through the symbolism. We don't know how to recognize faithfulness in a different context. We've become experts at exporting our culture to the rest of the world so that they pick up our religion, but never actually find their own faith and conviction. We haven't learned how to use the Sword of the Spirit to distinguish between the bones of faith and flesh of conviction.
Our Covenant is a Person, not a body of thought.
Indeed, there are some issues nailed down hard and fast in the New Testament. The single biggest issue is marital fidelity. American Christian religion has ignored this because it's just too difficult. Yet it remains a signature element in our testimony. Times have changed, but God hasn't changed, nor has human nature. So the single biggest shock in a conversion to the Covenant is just this one thing: human sexuality. The West has made a god of sexual fulfillment, whereas the Scripture says you might be better cutting things off if you can't bring it under control.
Does it scare you to realize that Jesus promoted self-mutilation as a valid option? Paul was much simpler with his promotion of total abstinence. Let me assure you that some men of faith have greeted with a great sigh of relief the fading of their libido because of all the pharmaceutical pollution in our water systems. How much time and how much energy have we wasted pursuing the animal urges to reproduce? Again, the Bible recognizes just how big that beast is, but it also warns that you must tame that thing or it will eat you alive.
And there are other issues the New Testament teaches in some detail, but there's an awful lot that is not mentioned. We need to discern why, and how to face it.
1. Some issues Jesus didn't mention because the issue was already handled correctly. The Jews didn't have everything wrong, just the issues Jesus addressed. Jews had a correct understanding of the evils of sexual perversion, so Jesus never talked about that. We keep forgetting that a primary mission of Christ was to correct Israel's adherence to the Covenant. There is a very substantial continuity between the Old and New Covenants.
2. Some issues were purely a matter of history and culture. The Apostles wrote quite often about "things offered to idols" as a common issue in their day, but we struggle to understand if there is even an equivalent in our world.
3. Other issues that plague us today didn't exist in that world. It's not as if they didn't have substance abuse, but it was nothing like the massive drug problem we face today. Were there other differences that kept them from having such a big problem, since those substances did exist to some degree in those days? Is their something about our world today that leaves us more vulnerable?
4. Finding parallels between biblical boundaries and our virtual world is a major problem, particularly for those born after the Internet came into existence. Where are the Covenant boundaries online?
5. We have far, far too little scholarship in things that Israel took for granted, things that no one talked about in the Bible because those issues were so obvious to them. For example, the business of living in your heart instead of your head looms very large here.
We have a very long way to travel back to that land, that people, that culture. If we don't travel there, then we might as well not bother translating the Book into our language. It will ever remain opaque and people will keep getting very important issues wrong. Christian holiness did not climax in any period in recent history. Are you tired yet of seeing crusaders demanding people return to the 1950s clothing and hairstyles? How about those who cling to the 1800s?
Yes, we face yet another serious problem on this journey. There is a vast empire of false understanding promoted by the unrepentant Jews. They had perverted their own legacy from the Old Testament and have actively opposed any honest exploration of what they had abandoned. They keep inserting themselves as "friendly" experts on the Old Testament so as to hide their sins. So, instead of being guarded against their lies, we have a majority of Christian religious leaders embracing them as saints. Meanwhile, Jews as a whole despise anything that smacks of Christianity (regardless how you define the term "Christian"). We keep nailing Jesus to the Cross and trying to keep Him in His tomb.
Today, I make no effort at all toward yet another reformation of the existing church. I've tried; I still have documents from that effort. I'm calling for an exodus. When working within the church system, I tried more than once to point out areas we needed to explore, and I was shut down so forcefully that I felt like a soldier whose position was overrun by a swarm of enemies. They didn't bother with formally kicking me out, but they did threaten civil legal action.
My convictions say "that ground is lost totally". All that's left is for us to forge out into the wilderness and start from scratch. If you sense the same kind of need to explore the unoccupied space of faith, let's compare notes. Let's start all over again forming covenant communities along wholly different lines. Let's roll this back somewhere before the currently existing structures were formed. Forget the current identity markers. Let's find out who we are supposed to be.
Comments
DarkMirror
"My convictions say 'that ground is lost totally'."
I stopped going to my current church, despite liking a few of the folks there, after reaching the same conclusion. I'm not like you -- I'm not as much of a leader or an agent of change, but hearing enough of the wrong thing was enough for me.
njresrie
Back in late 2017 at the church we tried to attend, there was a request for ideas for the next Bible study topic, so I suggested preparation/sanctification for the coming persecutions. You would have thought I suggested skinning bunnies and puppies, esp. from the look on the "facilitator"'s face. Oddly, I was somewhat shunned from then on, but not in any obvious ways. I guess they had lots of practice at that.
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