23 September 2024
We should make this clear: The Radix Fidem community does not want war. People of faith have no use for conflict. At the same time, we also know that war is unavoidable. Given that, we want it done right. Again, the biblical law code is not about peace, but how to do war righteously. The New Covenant is all about staying out of the affairs of human government. The old law code (Noah and Moses) is all about how governments should act. We know God's will for those who will not rise to His Covenant of faith.
It's always been that way. Recent community Bible lessons from the book of Hebrews points this out. Abraham and Melchizedek were part of the eternal covenant of faith, not a covenant of law. Moses and Noah were law covenants, always with major limitations, never reaching outside the context. The more particulars you have in the law code, the smaller its reach. Faith covenants have no limits.
The Hebrew worldview recognizes that most people pay no attention at all to divine revelation, neither for faith nor for law. Humans will go about their plans as if there is no God, as if the world will continue on its current path. In modern psychology, we call this the "normalcy bias" -- humans are convinced they know how reality works. Humans lose hope during prolonged oppression and simply give into temptation. In the Hebrew world view, this is a trap. Over and over again, the Hebrew expressions talk about a sudden shift when God acts, and it will overwhelm those who poke a finger in His eye.
It is typical of God to send prophets when He's about to act. They call people back to submission to Him. Right now, it's not looking too good for a move of repentance. The vast majority of humanity still worships at the altar of Normalcy Bias.
The mission and calling to prophecy is one thing. The art of prophetic vision is another, a different kind of calling on a different level. In the latter, we see that this is not at all like the rising tribulation at the end of First Century, running through the following three hundred years. Frankly speaking, God's people had spent so long under pressure that they had lost track of the prophetic art, and began to build man-made visions of a future. They got what they wanted: peace with the government. They lost their prophetic edge and folded themselves into human civil government.
Let's not do that again.
Part of what is so different this time around is that government has an entirely different set of tools and aspirations. There are some similarities in the basic stupidity of folks led by the Devil and his allies, but the situation is simply not the same. We have the same tools our government does. The primary battle in the first few centuries after Christ was a matter of arms and armies. Today it's all about information warfare, and the government simply does not control the distribution of info-weapons the way it did before.
It certainly wants that control, but cannot have it; there's not enough money in the world to lock down the Net they way officials would like. For every step they take, there's a counter that technology offers. It's going to be whack-a-mole, back and forth, escalating from one level to another. But the technology to counter censorship is already available. The genie of information networking will not go back into the bottle.
Should the government attempt to nationalize the hardware of the Internet, seizing full control, the freedom fighters will simply put up an unregulated mesh network. It already exists in some places for various reasons. What Israel did with Hamas and Hezbollah -- the exploding pagers and walkie talkies -- won't happen in the West. That part of the world has a tightly controlled network; we don't have that. It's too late for that kind of thing in the West. (Our government itself is highly dependent on an Internet it does not own.) The Islamic Resistance movement in the Middle East suffers from, not simply a poverty of networking development, but a philosophical bias against technology in the first place. Their use of networking communications is little different from our common consumer here.
Modern western humans already have a divided existence between the virtual world and the real world. It is being encouraged by TPTB, hoping to entrap their prey, but it traps them, too. We also have a massive number of people whose true allegiance is to the network society and defacto government there. This really complicates the picture for government. The government suffers a very serious lack of power over some things they want to rule. The virtual world is not easily controlled.
This is why we do not face what the first century Christians faced. This is a different world entirely. We cannot rely on all their policies; their law code won't work for us. Like all law codes, it fits only one context. We have to translate their code to our era and conditions. It requires the prophetic art.
In some indefinable way, this is part of why we have far fewer miracles than those saints had. The end goal is still Christ's glory, but the means and methods are different, because the context is different. We'll see those miracles when the Net becomes less usable and we are more isolated from each other. The existence of the Net is a critical part of why God is being subtle with His power. It's not as simple as deciding we must stop using the network in order to see miracles; God is in control of the conditions. There's something very hard to define in words about how networking reduces the appearance of miracles.
In actuality, it's more a matter of miracles being more subtle, not actually absent.
As we roll forward into our apocalypse, keep your eye on the networking situation. It's a major factor in what God is doing. It's not less power at work in our mission, but it's less flash.
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