12 June 2023
The Covenant focuses on privilege. Your individual liberty is not granted by default, but is based on demonstrated accountability. The Covenant is naturally pessimistic about human nature. It assumes a flawed fleshly nature that must be restrained. If you develop the ability to restrain it yourself, you are assumed fit to lead others.
It wasn't a question of merit in the Bible, as if you could gather some value of worth. Rather, you were granted privilege for the simple reason that you were not such a big threat. Thus, Jesus taught that if we did everything right, we are still not very worthy servants, because God's standards are very high (Luke 17:5-10). Humility is a dire need for peace with God. That by itself was a mark of nobility, an element of privilege in the ancient Hebrew culture.
It inculcated a fundamental doubt about yourself, which gave room for a wealth of confidence in Your God. Thus, you could act with great assurance because of a sense of calling, of being chosen for something. The greatness was not in you, but placed upon you by the inscrutable wisdom of someone far greater than you.
In Isaiah 14, the prophet reveals a taunt against the Babylonian Emperor that echoes the fall of Satan. The primary power of the taunt is how the human ruler was tempted by Satan to make the same mistake that Satan made. Jesus speaks in similar terms when He responds to the report of the evangelists He sent out, relating a vision of how Satan fell like lightning because those disciples were reclaiming the path of divine privilege. Those men were less like Pharisees, and more like ancient Hebrews.
There's a similar use of imagery in Ezekiel 28; we know the prophet addresses a human ruler, but he does so as if the man were motivated by Satan himself. Whenever Satan acts, his primary method is to get humans to copy his mistakes. That's how it was in the Garden, tempting Eve with the promise of being like God, rising to a higher role than God gave her.
We must never forget: God grants and withdraws privilege at His own whim, and whatever He does is always in our best interest. This is built into the Covenant. Something very similar was the norm across the Ancient Near East. The failure of this is what's behind God's judgment against Nebuchadnezzar, for example. The emperor knew better.
The arrogance of the Scribes and Pharisees was a clear departure from the ancient Hebrew culture. Rabbinical lore still made mention of the old ways, but they were too easy to ignore in the ferment of new influences drawn from Hellenism. Legalism presumes merit-building, turning the whole outlook on its head. That's because Hellenism presumes the inherent goodness of human nature, the greatness of man as the measure of all things. It was a very man-centered culture.
Do you understand why the West is collapsing? It bears the seeds of its own destruction. Our culture makes a virtue of arrogance. The path to star power and wealth is developing that attitude of believing in the self, as if we are all potential deities. They say the only path is self-actualization. We are told we are all little gods in the making, which is not much different from what Satan told Eve. It's a long stretch between saying that we are designed to know God versus saying that we all can become divine.
It is not the philosophy of a system that makes it work. The intentions are not the point, but whether God can tolerate it for any reason. He tolerates a system that serves to restrain our fallen natures. Inevitably, all human systems grind to a halt. They eventually fail in the things that God demands. That's fundamental to Genesis 9: We can't have people randomly killing each other. It refers to violence based on arrogance, not violence itself. Otherwise, God's command to Noah would not require that the community then turn around and execute the murderer. It's not because human life is sacred; it is most certainly not. Rather, the issue is how a culture or civilization accomplishes the minimum standard of restraining human sin.
Now we have a ruling class that intentionally shreds that restraint. They are determined to take the power into their own hands. They seek to render us helpless against their power by gutting the restraints that give us authority. This will work briefly, but it calls God's wrath down upon the system. The only escape from wrath is to embrace the humility of God's system.
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