27 September 2024
Mortal flesh is wired to forget. All it takes is just a little nudging to push things out of our central awareness. If the Devil can create a certain moral indolence, he doesn't have to fight our consciences. Instead of flatly denying moral truth, he persuades us to believe we have immediate priorities that require delaying the high investment of moral requirements. He agrees that we need to take it seriously, and that it requires "doing it right" and we don't have time for that right now. Take care of it later.
Then it becomes a nagging ball of unfinished business. It's the paradox of needing serious attention, but having no time right now for that. With it standing there nagging us, and a false perception that the demands are too great, we are powerless to resist the thousands of little slips away from moral purity. Moral truth becomes the very thing that bleeds away our resolve to be faithful to Christ.
This is the situation for westerners in particular. It's an awful way to live. We really need something to keep us away from that.
God knew this, and His answer was the Sabbath cycle and a strong sense of tribal feudal identity. One day out of seven, all the cares of this world must be set aside by law, so that we can engage that big wad of moral necessities we have neglected the rest of the week. And it became a fundamental doctrine that God would be patient and wait for you to come clean before Him that one day in seven.
And the written revelation was at pains to inject the moral necessities into every corner of your existence. There were boundaries your flesh could recognize, building into your consciousness a hesitance to cross them. Even if God couldn't really get your heart, at least your flesh would feel constrained to avoid defiling things for those who did cling to Him.
It was all based on a sense of communal identity, a reservoir of social constraints so that you were not on your own. It taught people to lean on the community of faith, even if they had no significant faith of their own. The teaching of the law code didn't bring a sense of personal guilt; it was meant to strengthen the bond and stabilize the sense of self on the participation in community. It would be impossible to stand alone without faith, and the majority never had faith. This linked the weak ones back to those strong in faith.
Individuals are not supposed to carry a nagging conscience. They are supposed to trust in the judgment of the community, and their duty to avoid burdening those to whom they are inextricably bound.
All it took were a few key figures with faith keeping everyone else on the right track. As weak as this might seem, it was the way God wanted things. He knows our design; He is the only one who can propose solutions to the inherent flaws. From the very beginning, the divinely revealed model of human existence took into account that the Elect were in the minority. In order for them to be a redemptive presence, social structure had to depend on that model of tribal consciousness, of feudal submission to leadership who bore a heavy duty to the frame of moral reference.
Divine revelation has a broad eternal purpose that is opaque to those without faith. Human existence requires people of faith to keep things on track so that humanity can receive the best existence possible. The whole key is the Covenant community life.
Our western model of evangelism is based on multiple lies from Satan. Our culture assumes individualism and empowers the false guilt that keeps people away from faith; it keeps moral issues inside of religious habits that destroy the model God laid out in revelation. The whole point of revelation was to maximize the inheritance of the Elect while they were here. It is also the best hope for the non-elect, but they really aren't the point.
Biblical evangelism is an appeal to the Elect. It means you and I embracing the divine priorities and shining that light to draw the Elect. They are wired to look for that. It has nothing to do with ginning up psychological manipulations that walk people through a ritual confession and emotional experience. We have the expectation that, most of the time, the Elect will be drawn slowly, rising to full awareness until the fruit is ripe. Notice how that image dominates the gospel message: harvesting the ripe crops.
Worship is a celebration. To be honest, the primary focus in worship is being grateful to God for bringing His children home to the Covenant. That becomes the gateway for everything else we include in seeking to glorify the Lord. It's not about music and preaching; those are things that belong to community gatherings in general, family time together in the evenings or on holidays. But those other activities are not worship. Worship is celebrating the blessings of the Covenant, and the One who gave it.
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