24 March 2023
Step back and take a wide view of what Jesus taught. I won't burden you with a hundred Scripture references; you should know this stuff. Jesus taught that the Covenant of Moses was the clearest revelation of His Father's character and will. He also taught that it was imperfect, but moving in the right direction. At the end, He declared that He was the personification of the New Covenant, a clearer and better revelation of the Father's will. Even under Moses, everyone understood that you must make the Father your feudal Master. But it was the rest that was so often in dispute, so Jesus summed it up as a command to love each other as He loved.
Jesus also addressed the question of who should be treated as a covenant brother, citing the example of the Good Samaritan. It's not a question of DNA or even national allegiance, but the functional definition of someone who acts according to the Code. That's what the Code is for; it serves in part as a handy gauge to decide whom to embrace as family. Even online, where anonymity is so important, it's easy to discern people who exhibit respect for the Scripture, who have a heart for souls.
But the Code is not the whole Covenant. Sooner or later you will need to answer the questions about Covenant boundaries. Even without that language, you can tell if someone honors things your convictions say are sacred. Who is your brother/sister? Who is at least a good ally? In Jesus' day there was a lingering spite between Jews and Samaritans, but the truth is that the latter had better adherence to Moses than those who held to the Talmud. Jesus was pointing to that, because the Good Samaritan was by no means preposterous, but actually rather common. What Jesus described in His story was typical Samaritan behavior. In that sense, Samaritans were closer to covenant brothers than many Jews.
In other words, nationality meant nothing. Do you get that? This is not cosmopolitan nonsense; it's not embracing just any old human. There are very clear boundaries; that was the whole point -- show compassion for each other within the Covenant. We don't embrace pagans or secularists. They are by no means family. We treat them as strangers, foreigners, aliens. Yes, we may still be kind to them, but they do not gain the privileges of Covenant family.
During the Conquest of Canaan, Israel would uphold the Code of Noah for anyone who remained in the land. The Conquest was a series of plundering raids that destroyed the pagan temples in the land. It was not a simple conquest of destruction, because anyone who capitulated to the terms of the Covenant of Noah was allowed to remain.
Thus, the Gibeonites who cut wood and carried water for the Tabernacle and Temple were under Noah. So it was for the Jebusites from whom David captured the citadel. They weren't slaughtered; they remained under the Covenant of Noah. They kept a feudal loyalty to whomever ruled Israel. Remember Ornan/Arauna, the guy whose threshing floor became the site of Solomon's Temple? He was a Jebusite, and his threshing floor above the citadel was still his property until David bought it. The same held for anyone who sojourned with Israel in the Exodus, but didn't convert fully to become a part of the nation, like the Kenites (Jethro's folks). The national identity of Israel was never a matter of bloodline, but the Covenant.
What is your identity today? Do you understand that the civic rituals for America are of pagan origin? Look up Francis Bellamy. He was a communist who promoted the Pledge of Allegiance and adopted what eventually became the fascist salute in Europe (James Upham came up with it, and may have actually composed the Pledge). Yes, Hitler copied Bellamy's idea on that. It was later changed in 1942 to the hand-over-heart thing. Also, the phrase "under God" was added to the Pledge because of the resistance from church leaders to a clearly pagan ritual. By adding those two words, US leaders felt they could force Christians to accept the Pledge (oddly, it was the Jehovah's Witnesses who organized to resist this, but they weren't the only ones who questioned it). It has never been "one nation under God" because it has never been under any covenant.
I don't hate the American flag. It serves as a symbolic replacement for a monarch. My loyalty is conditional. Notice that when God allowed pagan nations to conquer Israel, the people knew they had to bow to their pagan overlords. But they didn't have to engage in pagan worship; Mordecai refused to hold up his hands in supplication to the officials of the Persian imperial court. If you could get a more precise translation of the text of Esther, you would realize that this was something peculiar to the Persians. The preceding empires never required hands uplifted as in prayer, but the Persians did, and Israelis could not do it. I can't salute the American flag, but I have no objection to most of the requirements of civic obedience. I'm under an alien political rule.
I don't vote because this is not my nation. My nation is the Kingdom of Heaven. Maybe you don't see a conflict, but I do. I'll stand for the Pledge, but I don't put my hand on my heart. My heart belongs to Christ, and He's not an American. (The military salute is a different symbol, representing feudal submission, not worship.) I don't get emotional when someone plays the National Anthem, and I don't sing along. Make of that what you will, but I must follow my own convictions.
My point is to raise a consciousness of the issue: Where is your ultimate loyalty? How do you decide who is family and who is not? The words translated as "neighbor" in the Bible all indicate someone who was under the same covenant, not simply someone who resided nearby. Jesus said the Code is what marks people as your neighbor. The Centurion whose servant He healed was an ally under the Code of Noah. The Syro-Phoenician woman whose daughter Jesus healed declared herself under the feudal covering of Israel. Jesus said don't throw pearls to swine, referring to Jews who falsely claimed to be under the Covenant, but had rejected the actual Law of Moses. It's not a question of having boundaries, but knowing where they are.
Our boundaries are not political, but moral and spiritual.
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