26 July 2023
All of Creation is inherently feudal. It's not in your face, but to make the most of what God offers us in this life, we need to operate on feudal assumptions.
A fundamental element in feudalism is power and accountability. Holding yourself accountable to your constituency is one thing; being accountable to God is a completely different matter. The emphasis in the Bible is on accountability to God for what He has granted you. The same goes for those under whom He places over you; they are accountable to Him.
If you can grasp the image of Jehovah's divine court with lesser elohim assigned to manage things for Him, then you begin to see that feudalism in the spiritual realm. Granted, revelation indicates that there is some apparent measure of rebellion going on, but it's not a total rejection of divine sovereignty. Rather, it's a matter that these divine managers have some free will, a measure of free will that God insists on maintaining until some final end point.
Some elohim are more compliant than others. Some are more compliant in certain ways, or regarding certain issues. There is not a thing you can do about this. You have to live with it.
But here's the kicker: How we organize our human activity under these beings can complicate things immensely for us. Do you like the idea of having multiple unpredictable divine managers messing with your life? Isn't it fun having the mass confusion of a large number of competing "deities" trying to take advantage of you all at once?
In the Old Testament, you'll catch that kind of imagery. Choosing to be faithful to just one god and embracing his authority reduces the confusion and fear factor in this world. That way, any other god must come to him to mess with you. That is how Jehovah Himself depicts the situation. What happened to Pharaoh and his deities in the Exodus is a picture of how Jehovah very jealously guards His domain.
But that guardianship comes with a significant set of boundaries. That's what the Covenant is all about, what it has always been about. If you mess around, very bad things can happen, because you place yourself in someone else's domain, and those other deities are not nearly so nice. They don't love you the way Jehovah does.
A major element of the Covenant boundaries is holding to a tribal feudal organization for your human existence. The cosmopolitan secular orientation of modern western culture is simply a rejection of all boundaries, so that the various elohim can get their hands on you. This includes the most rebellious and obnoxious ones. They represent all kinds of things in human politics and social commitments other than those in the Covenant.
The Covenant boundaries protect you. The broad sense of disorder, the social and political chaos represents how wide open most people are to being abused by multiple rebellious elohim. That's what we are seeing. They all have their multiple idolatries, all totally ignorant of the spiritual realities, and the demands these lesser deities make on them.
If Jesus is your Lord, then His authority trumps all of theirs. You still have to deal with the sorrows of being human, but He promised to keep it manageable. Unlike the others, He doesn't deceive His constituents.
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