20 March 2023
In the Bible, "faith" is a commitment to doing things God's way. It means absorbing revelation and making it your identity. It's not simply a body of principles; it's a personal commitment between two people, which then goes on to embrace the family of people who share the same commitment. So, while faith includes ideas like trust, stability of purpose, conviction and drive, etc., it's more about making your commitment plain to others. The commitment obviously means nothing until it results in a hard drive to uphold the reputation of God.
Human intelligence plays a simple role: organizing and implementing that commitment within the context. Human reason does not like taking this backseat role. It bears a lust to rule, not to serve. It's the job of your conscious awareness to assert that rule of faith. The mind is part of the flesh, which we nail to the Cross, humbled and forced to serve. You enslave your flesh, despite it's constant carping and rebellion. It's all you have to work with.
The flesh has a common sullen reaction of demanding a simplistic rules-based regimen. This is simply a tactic for seizing control; it's meant to pull the process of decision down into its own territory. The rules can be manipulated with semantic juggling to allow the flesh to demand satisfaction of its lusts. We must guard against this, keeping the decision process in the higher level of the soul, in the heart where convictions reside. Convictions are the imprint of God's personality in our eternal souls. We cannot trust our mortal fleshly nature. It must be compelled to accept whatever comes down from above. It must be forced to consider the personal element of faith, when it would rather reduce all things to mechanics, as the means to gain control and sate its lusts.
Your flesh is not unlike a willful brat, always looking for an opportunity to seize control of the situation for the very narrow purpose of hedonistic comfort. Even when it includes all kinds of glowing manipulative language about how great life can be with arts and beauty, it's just a cover for the three lusts: appetites, entertainment and whims (AKA, Lust of the Flesh, Lust of the Eyes and the Boastful Pride of Mortal Existence).
When you embrace faith, you enter into a place in your soul that wants to know God as a Person. You are drawn to explore His motivations, His interests. This obsession becomes your whole moral guide. You come to an instinctive awareness that this life is expendable, and the comforts of the flesh mean nothing. Indeed, they are a distraction. Life is just a tool to be used until it wears out. The true purpose is far beyond this life.
Thus, it should become a reflex that we tell the world about God's truth, but by no means could we compel the world to obey. That must come from inside of each individual. Yes, the gospel message includes a code, a regimen of life that sets initial boundaries. But the whole point is to draw the convictions out of hiding and into dominion over the human existence. Once the soul comes to life, it can rely on the code to remind itself of the boundaries of God's love and provision based on His character. But those boundaries are not God Himself; they simply remind us of Him as a Person. The flesh sees only restrictions, but the heart celebrates the privileges.
The code is merely a tool, a means of training the conscious awareness. It signals what to expect from the voice of God speaking in our convictions. We are supposed to enforce the code on ourselves as a general guideline. But quite naturally, there are needy people around us who will seek the refuge of our moral certainty. Some are inherently dependent by God's design (women and children) and some are only temporarily dependent because of circumstances. We can use the code to get them started on the right path, to bring a sense of moral consistency. They may or may not obey, as they fight with their own fleshly natures, but the one thing that makes us the object of their affection is the consistency that allows them to trust us.
This is a part of the telling process. We must do what we say. It must defy the grasp of their fleshly natures, so that they cannot dismiss us as mere machinery. We become great in their eyes in part because of the element of mystery that transcends their fleshly grasp. It calls on them to rise to a higher level so they can also know God as a Person, not as a body of rules.
Only within the exercise of our feudal dominion of covenant faith can we raise up a living standard, a "government" that holds people accountable. Without that dominion, there is no covering, no blessing from God that comes with the privileges of the Covenant. The Covenant includes miracles as normative, not as rare and random events. God cannot bless people through us with miracles who do not acknowledge our dominion. They can share with us their own dominion, blending and amplifying the miraculous if they exercise any, but the point here is that we cannot participate with God's dominion in others without having a measure of our own as a gift from His hand. Thus, the blessing of an enforced moral code is rather thin for those under dominion and still in the flesh.
It's a very sad thing to be hemmed in by the law without any grace. The joy of blessings and miracles are not directly a part of that person's life, but are applied externally. Still, under our dominion, they stand in the place of Covenant promises.
We cannot in any way do any good to anyone by enforcing a code on them without that element of personal dominion. It is utterly impossible to share a blessing without the existence of a moral covering, and covering demands moral authority. They must be dependent on us. Thus, we cannot project a moral government over people who refuse our covering. We can advise a government that has the physical means of power, but we cannot demand compliance from those outside of our dominion. Even if we seize the means of power, we cannot bless those under that power unless we first establish the credibility of moral dominion. They must recognize that dominion personally. There must be shepherd-sheep connection that they accept consciously.
To harass and nag as political activists cheapens the message. We can justly demand any outside government to permit the exercise of our actual authority over those who come under our covering, but we cannot operate under the pretense of equality as citizens who vote. That is anathema to the whole process. We either have authority, or we do not. God Himself does not recognize the notion that we are all individually isolated against the monstrous single authority of some pagan or secular government. We are not individual voters; we are all members of a tribe, a nation that is morally autonomous. We already have a government in God, speaking through His Word and our convictions.
An outside government will naturally seek to invade the moral boundaries of the tribe and claim sovereignty over the individuals according to its own whims. A critical part of our mission is to compel such a government to deal with us a single, unified entity. And we do so not on their limited terms (like a corporate "person" that submits to their rules), but by making extravagant demands that said government will bow to our Lord's authority. Not so that we become the government, but that it recognize our Lord as, at the very least, their equal. If they refuse, then we refuse to deal with them; we do not take them seriously. Notice, I'm not saying that we don't have to make allowances for the exercise of their physical power. Rather, we refuse to treat them as morally illegitimate.
Thus, our covenant family refuses to become one of their recognized corporations. We keep "telling" -- insisting on being taken seriously on the terms God established. Meanwhile, we refuse to play their game. We'll just keep working around them and trying to stay out of the path of their hatred. We'd rather they become a part of the Kingdom, or even an allied tribe in their own right, but we cannot do that as long as they reject the sovereignty of our God and the basic Covenant code as valid law.
The western social and political mythology has no basis in the teachings of Christ. The whole gamut of secular government theory is pagan, a rejection of the Covenant. We can live and let live, but we cannot participate in the "democratic process" without defiling ourselves. We cannot ask a defiled government to implement our policies, even if that would be in everyone's best interest. We cannot favor them with the privileges of the Covenant; they would receive no covering blessing, even if we succeeded in forcing our rules down their throats. And we would receive no blessing from such a process, either. There is no real benefit from secular morality; it becomes a simple game of people claiming human reason for the basis of random behavior that offers no moral advantage at all.
Once more: There is no blessing from the Covenant moral code outside the personal connection with the Covenant God. Imposing our code on outsiders is just a door for Satan to create resentment against our God. It serves only to reduce His reputation. The glory of our God is to demonstrate the blessings of His miracle covering through a genuine love for His revelation. We can enforce His code only on those who are under our dominion. That dominion must be based on tribal feudal social connections.
That's the Covenant privilege. That's what makes it precious.
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