30 March 2023
I've gotten several queries about Our God Is a Barbarian. It was meant to raise a lot of questions. The radical difference between God's way and our human ways can be shocking when you've been fed a bunch of nonsense your whole life.
The questions are more important than my answers. You must seek the Lord's face for your own answers. Still, most of you have asked for mine, so here we go.
I'm poking at the foundation of a badly placed wall that will not stand when destruction comes. It won't do to simply restack the stones in a few places. The questions we must ask ourselves are very fundamental to our existence in this fallen world. The assumptions we have been taught are false.
Jesus Christ is our Covenant, our Living Law. We dare not interpret His words by assigning to them the false meanings of those who never really knew Him. He stands in an alien world, so getting to know Him requires traveling an awfully long way, and relearning all of our basic assumptions about reality, about how things actually work. His own people rejected Him, so He had to seek a different people to be His nation. His own people abandoned their identity and changed their perception of the world. They were no longer Hebrew, but Jewish -- a totally different thing. It's entirely wrong to imagine that Jesus left behind everything that made Him who He is. Our God built that Hebrew frame of reference in order to reveal Himself; what He built reflects who He is, insofar as we are in any way able to perceive Him. Jesus remains a Hebrew Lord.
So, it's our duty to become as Hebrew as possible in our ability to see Him. I realize that's a very tall order. It doesn't require an academic study at a PhD level to get there; that would include a lot of useless baggage. But the farther away you start, the harder it is to get close enough to do you any good. The journey itself is the whole point, since the destination is not in this world in the first place. The Hebrew intellectual assumptions are just the earthly packaging. We are wired to think that way, but the issue is all the garbage we've been fed that hinders us. It's not data we learn, but a Person we get to know.
Christ our Covenant is everything. His Father taught the nation of Israel a way of looking at things, but they abandoned it. We have to join His work of restoring things. In Acts 15, James quoted from Amos 9, where the Lord warns Israel that they have alienated themselves from Him personally. Then, in verses 11 and 12, He promises to raise up the ruins of His nation from Gentiles. We have to enter that tabernacle of David's royal household, and I contend that includes becoming more Hebraic in how we look this world.
By definition, Hebrew justice equals God's justice. The western sense of justice is quite different, so it is not God's justice. (Let's not get lost in semantics -- in English, justice is an abstract concept that is bitter and punitive in nature. Law refers to the combination of constitution, legislation and jurisprudence that seeks to promote justice. The Hebrew language carries connotations we don't have in English. The Bible says justice is not abstract, but a very real peace with your feudal sovereign. Law and Covenant in Hebrew can indicate the same thing, but a covenant is much more than our English word "law" indicates. Furthermore, in Hebrew "law" is the expressed will of the feudal sovereign, whereas a law code is simply an outline of the law. Everything is much more personal in nature. We don't cling to Hebrew law code, the Law of Moses, because it suited the conditions of the Israeli people in their ancient time and place. It was never regarded as universal in nature. The Code of Noah is regarded as universal; see the references to God on His throne with a rainbow on display. The rainbow is the symbol of God's will expressed in Noah's Covenant. Moses was a single implementation of Noah; it expounded on Noah in a single context. We do cling to a Hebrew sense of justice as knowing God; "knowing" means obeying in that sense. The silliness of English semantics struggles to handle Hebrew mysticism.)
David was God's model king. He managed to balance ferocity against enemies in battle against his shepherd's compassion for those in his flock. The question was always recognizing the difference between who was and wasn't his flock. Jesus addressed that same question in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Who is your "neighbor"? The whole point is that it's not a matter of fleshly DNA, but spiritual DNA. All you to go on is the moral behavior you can see. So on the one hand, David was constrained by custom and law to protect the whole nation, regardless of what was in their hearts. On the other hand, he couldn't allow some of his own people to get too close to him. His own sons plotted against him at times.
How do you carry out that kind of balancing act? You are the only one who can answer that. You must decide how vulnerable you must be, and what vulnerabilities you will embrace as necessary for the mission.
Have you ever dealt with children who were so badly damaged that they would intentionally piss on the bathroom floor just to spite you? Have you seen little kids physically assault someone who didn't give them what they wanted? Do you have any idea how much work it would be to change that child into someone who acts more responsibly? When there is no time or resources, you have to draw a line somewhere and simply keep them out of the way of things you must do. It's not likely you would want to harm them in the process of keeping them out of way, but we are facing the kind of social breakdown that will challenge all your assumptions. Can you afford to have random children stealing the food for your own children? Yes, it will be that bad.
You need to draw those boundaries now, before it happens.
The biggest hindrance is the very strong social conditioning we have endured as westerners in general, and Americans in particular. It's a conditioning that is anti-Christian, in the sense that it has been hostile to the Hebrew outlook of our Savior.
Jesus warned the Syro-Phoenician woman that He had no moral duty to heal her daughter, since she wasn't under the Covenant that set boundaries for His ministry. The woman's answer was very perceptive: I'm not family, for sure, but I do crawl under the table in Your household, so can I at least lick up the scraps Your children drop on the floor? She was submitting to His dominion, calling for Him to extend His covering from a wealth of provision. There will always be special cases, and you must decide. But you cannot simply leave the door open. How many thousands of Gentile children in His vicinity did Jesus neglect? Do you understand why He did so?
Our western culture scolds Him for that because it does not understand. Our sense of moral domain is deeply compromised by western notions regarding who belongs and who does not. American judges have confiscated the life savings of people to provide for someone they didn't even know, and did not bring into this world. Our government has done it's best to load us up with guilt and fear so we would be less likely to resist. Every facet of our ears and eyes are daily bombarded with propaganda saying that we are responsible for starving ourselves so that someone else can pig out.
It's not always that clear cut. Play the scenarios out in your mind and test your conscience, because you'll face demands that God says you must resist. And you'll need to know beforehand when and where you'll resist, and by what means. You would likely kill someone trying to rape your daughter, but who else might you be willing to kill under less clear cut circumstances? That's the question we must learn to answer from a biblical perspective. Scripture says typical American boundaries are wrong.
So I'll tell you again: The previous post linked above outlines first the defaults when we don't have a word from God. They cover the theoretical context of warfare in defense of your covenant community, which is equivalent to your family household. Do you have a clear sense of who is under your covering?
Farther down that post I discuss how to operate as a mercenary, which I define as warfare outside of protecting your covenant household. If God calls you to military service, then go. But it's a different world, one that's very complicated. You are still under the Covenant as an individual, but you don't represent the Covenant in quite the same way. You are under another flag; you have to play by their rules. The limits are different. Granted, if it so happens your commander orders an attack on your own covenant community, you would certainly be morally forced to fight your comrades in arms. Nobody has to tell you that, but it's highly unlikely to happen.
I also mention that you may sense a calling to join a rebellion against your non-covenant government. By no means do I recommend that, but I can't pretend to have authority to say God won't do that. He does appoint some of His servants to work alongside angels of wrath. So, if you take that path, the Covenant still has boundaries for you. If you are joining an organized rebellion, then play by their rules, just as you would in a government military organization. If you feel called to work alone, then you'll have to form a mental frame of reference to replace that organization. You are still committing yourself to some strategy, and you need to be clear about it. What's the point of all this? Who is the enemy, and by what means do you make war?
How many women and children were saved from Sodom and Gomorrah? When you can answer that question, you will understand what I wrote about there being no limits down at the bottom of that post where I mention being a mercenary. If destruction is the whole point, you need to have that very clear in your mind before you start making war. The children of Sodom and Gomorrah could not be saved because they were under the feudal dominion of people who served demons. They were already damned, and the path to redemption for them was closed. If you don't understand that, then you aren't ready to play that role.
Hint: I was trying to discourage people from trying to go that route. I wanted to awaken the image of horror so that anyone who felt they "just gotta do something" about all the evil our government is doing would realize that the only valid path they could take would demand more than they might want to handle. The Angel of Death makes no distinction between persons, and working alongside that angel is not pleasant. You will have to live with your conscience, so make sure you are ready for it.
Now maybe you can understand how easily Israel failed to clear out all the folks in Canaan God wanted them to drive out. David was strong enough to wipe out whole communities because of how long and how deeply He got to know his Lord. It wasn't fun and games putting people under saws and plows to execute them. But it was what God required, so God protected him from being emotionally wounded because his motives were to please his Lord. Can you climb up to that standard? It's not easy. If that's your mission, you should be able to handle it, but the question is whether that's really your calling.
Most of us who seek the Covenant have all we can do just limiting how much we care about people who would take advantage of us. That's about as much warfare as we can handle. The biggest hurdle we face is the false notion that this human existence is worth anything. Killing humans is not inherently wrong; the Bible condemns "murder" -- improper killing. The question is not killing, nor is it really a matter of whom, but when, how and why you kill. Human lives are not inherently precious. While the Bible warns of legal and political complications arising from non-covenant human governments, it does not recognize such government claims on the monopoly of force.
You rightly value only those lives in which you have invested, those that come under your covering in any way. Just because someone is alive does not give them any claim on what God has give you. And stop idolizing youth; being young does not increase the value of human life. Vulnerability simply increases the cost of keeping that life. The Bible teaches a default position of being merciful to the vulnerable (like widows and orphans) but only if they belong to your covenant community. Our mercy on strangers in any condition is at a much lower level, only what the Lord tells us is surplus. They are not family and not eligible for your covering. Rescue and refuge are not the same as covering.
Know your Covenant boundaries.
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