16 July 2023
Yesterday I wrote to summarize the difference between Moses and Christ:
Law is for the witness and community; faith is for the individual soul. Law never got you to Heaven. Law got you a stable community and a strong witness. Faith always got you to Heaven under any covenant, and it drives you to seek a witness and a stable community. All law covenants end with the Return of Christ. His Spiritual Covenant does not end because it never began; it's inherent in the eternal nature of God.
The Radix Fidem way recognizes the doctrine of Two Realms, the Spirit Realm and Fleshly Realm (AKA the Fallen Realm). These two do overlap, and that conceptual space is referred to as the moral realm. That one doesn't get a capitalized name because it's just a collision of the other two. The moral realm is recognized as a generic idea already, but we claim the term as having a more well-defined meaning.
Then again, we discuss the whole thing only as parable. We grapple with the pragmatic implications of something ineffable. Thus, Law Covenants certainly reach into the moral realm by implication. It is wholly impossible to observe any of the Law Covenants without a sense of conviction and commitment from the heart. That's a universal prerequisite. Every law covenant ever established presumes you are operating from the heart, clinging to a feudal tribal commitment with the specific aim of producing a witness.
The big difference between Moses and Noah is the specificity of requirements in Moses, and that it is a single unique national covenant, whereas Noah is all other nations. In a certain sense, Jehovah holds His divine council accountable to Him regarding Noah. If by keeping Noah, you and I should defy any of the lesser Elohim, Jehovah backs us up on it. In effect, Creation itself backs us, because Noah is how Creation operates as a whole.
The whole point of Noah as a law covenant, as stated in the quote above, is the matter of community and testimony. God is very generous; people who aren't spiritually born can hitch onto a covenant community and catch a very substantial portion of miraculous blessings.
For example, do you understand that biblical divination specifically belongs to the Covenant? Even without an officially ordained prophet, a genuine covenant community can gain a word from the Lord by following the protocols. Yes, it's possible for the whole community to be deluded about what kind of request God would answer, but in a general sense, divination is part of the divine inheritance that comes with a law covenant. It's more a matter of law than of faith.
Indeed, faith alone will not get you the Covenant blessings. Your individual faith should drive you to observe some semblance of a law covenant, but you may not be that informed. You will still spend Eternity in Heaven with God, but you'll miss out on the divine heritage of the Covenant here on earth. That's the problem for most genuine believers; they have been so badly deceived that they will die without seeing many of the Covenant blessings.
The problem is that virtually everyone in Bible times associated the word "salvation" more with Covenant blessings than with spiritual birth. You would naturally expect the two to come together in the same package, but they don't these days. There is a tremendous amount of confusion about the implications of the Two Realms doctrine. You can get a lot of church folks to nod their heads about that quoted paragraph above, but they still don't chase out the full meaning in terms of how they operate. To them, it's just a doctrine, not a guiding principle.
They don't understand that King David was Elect in both senses of the word. God had a worldly purpose for David's reign as king, so David's horrible crime regarding Bathsheba didn't earn him the death penalty. God plays favorites, and in some cases will bend the rules, simply because He is the Law. And who can doubt that, when David died, he went to be with the Lord? His faith is what made him love the Law (Psalm 119), because the Law was just an expression of his Master.
God has priorities, but you cannot really understand them without faith. His agenda among humans is a living thing, but only those who invest themselves into knowing Him personally get a clue about that agenda. In other words, you can muddle through on law code alone, but without faith, you aren't really going to please Him. The best you can hope for without faith is to hang around with people who do have faith, and cling to their covering.
All those unique individual faith covenants God had with major figures in the Bible are now summed up in His Son. It's open to all of us, but it should make us more like David, in love with any covenant revelation God has ever made anywhere. We will go anywhere and do anything it takes to make sure we don't miss out on anything God has revealed.
That's the kind of people who don't choke on some shocking new teaching like Heiser's divine council. All we really want to know is if it really is in the Word. If so, then we have to work out the implications.
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