25 January 2024
We left off in yesterday's post with this...
To summarize the distinctions: (1) eternal spiritual birth (grace) was always available to the Elect since before Creation; (2) the higher moral obligation of personal feudal submission was inherent in the Flaming Sword (mercy) and all the rest of God's revelation. Feudal submission did not in itself make you Elect, but it is the path the Elect must take to return to Eden.
Eden is not precisely defined in Hebrew thinking as either only eternal election or just mercy in this world. It's fuzzy on purpose because the actual nature of the connection between feudal submission and eternal election is beyond human comprehension. But the mechanical "works of the law" has always been a perversion. It was always a human temptation from the start, yet became a major issue sometime before the Babylonian invasion, because it was becoming institutionalized into Judean government. It got far worse during the Restoration (consider Malachi's prophecy), and became the trademark of Judaism in the New Testament. The arrival of Hellenism simply locked it in place, giving it the force of moral reasoning and civil code enforcement.
To continue, miracles are not neatly defined within this frame of reference. On the one hand, God authorizes miracles at His personal whim. They can be wholly random from our perspective. On the other hand, He has promised to link them to His Covenants. In that sense, we can say that miracles belong to the Covenants, but are not confined by them. It's a huge mistake to think they are controlled by some aspect of spiritual birth. Spiritual birth is not the key to miracles. The most consistent access to miracles comes from the Covenant and your full-hearted embrace of feudal submission to God as your Master in this life.
You can, in theory, embrace Him as your Master in this life. You may lack the power to implement it totally, but it can characterize your life. That's just part of our human wiring. Only by His divine personal Presence can you embrace Him spiritually as Lord. This is why it is so important to recognize that spiritual birth is not a matter of human choice. God does not offer spiritual birth to every human; some are not Elect. But He does grant miracles in this life on terms such that every human can receive them. The blessings of the Covenant are one thing and spiritual birth is another. The Covenant can help you understand what spiritual birth is all about, but the two are separate domains.
And this is why Paul says in Galatians that obeying the Covenant ("the Law") cannot bring you spiritual redemption. It can point you in the right direction for blessings and miracles, but it cannot bring you into God's eternal Presence.
On the other hand, you cannot enter the Covenant of Christ without spiritual birth. The New Covenant of Christ is a separate category from every other covenant God has offered. Instead of an earthly nation by birth, it's an empire of hearts by spiritual birth. Christ is by invitation only. It's a personal encounter between you and Christ, wherein you swear allegiance to Him as your ultimate Lord and Master. That's the meaning of the baptism ritual; it's what Jesus signaled when He was baptized in the Jordan. He was declaring His feudal submission to His Father, which is the meaning John the Baptist had invested into his preaching. That word "repent" indicated a restoration of submission to Jehovah for Jews. In John's ministry, because it was to announce the coming Messiah, baptism was a token of the shift in the Covenant from earthly to spiritual.
Covenant blessings were going to be officially granted to people from every background, Jewish or otherwise. This was what shocked the whole Judean establishment. It meant the end of their monopoly on being declared "God's Family". Now, anyone could become part of God's Family by His invitation. The reason Jesus needed to invest so much effort in clarifying what Moses actually taught was because that global invitation was the stated intent of the Covenant of Moses. Jews had completely lost touch with that part of Moses' revelation.
The name "Israel" took on a different meaning. It was no longer a matter of DNA and legal observance of Jewish law. In Christ, it became a matter of spiritual birth, and had nothing at all to do with fleshly identity.
Paul noted in Romans that some Gentiles had gained spiritual birth and peace with God without ever having heard about the Covenant of Moses. They simply obeyed their convictions. Christ came to formalize the "law = conviction" system so that the offer became a mandate, a message that must be taken to the whole world. This would allow the spiritually born all over the world to also obtain the Covenant promises in Christ. They could lay claim to their earthly inheritance as well as the divine.
This is why I have said in the past that Jesus did not die on the Cross to bring spiritual birth. That had been happening all along; do you doubt that Abraham was "born again" before the Law was revealed? A part of Jesus' late night conference with Nicodemus was that the possibility of spiritual birth was inherent in the teaching of Moses. Nicodemus should have known about that. Spiritual birth was always possible under the Law, and those who truly understand Moses sincerely hoped people would gain it. But the Law itself was not the means, only the gateway to awareness.
The Covenant offered in Christ swaps the roots of the Covenant from Law to spiritual birth. It pulls the law code away from this one peculiar earthly nation and makes it a spiritual empire. It changes the law from a very specific code of life for one people into a broad moral concept that everyone can understand regardless of background. Jesus is our Living Law, our Living Covenant. It doesn't take away the value of a law code, but changes the nature of how that code is expressed. There is still a code of sorts in the Covenant of Christ.
Still, to understand the code that comes with the Covenant of Christ does require learning the peculiar mystical frame of reference the Hebrew people were supposed to have. It was demanded of them and it's demanded of us. It's part of the Covenant. So, the focus of a Christian church is to incubate that changed frame of reference. It's a very inward facing orientation because of the vast depth of need, and how very hard the task is. It's not enough to announce that Jesus opened the door; we need a heavy investment in what's behind that door. There's a burdensome demand for this fallen human existence to be slowly killed off in favor of the Eternal.
"Teach them everything I have commanded you" does not refer to a simple list, but a broad wealth of moral orientation.
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