02 October 2024
I'm not telling you what to believe. I'm telling you what I believe. You can make up your own mind.
What is the fundamental question, the essence of what truly matters from a human level? In Scripture, it is assumed to be making peace with the Creator. We are expected to seek His favor as our feudal master. This is the primary question.
The narrative in Genesis begins with that assumption. Adam and Eve started at peace with God, but there was a rebellion on His staff in Heaven. The core issue that occupies all of Heaven is how Lucifer wanted to receive some of the worship and glory going to God, and God took exception to this. Satan rejected God's rules about this, placing him in rebellion. This got him sentenced to a punitive duty: being the jailer and prosecutor ("Satan") and having to stay in the jail himself. In English the jail is called "the Abyss" -- whatever that means, it includes confining Lucifer under time and space constraints. For an eternal being, that's quite unpleasant.
In the process of this dispute, Lucifer challenged the rest of God's staff, and some joined in the call for them to receive glory, too. We don't understand the connection, but somehow being placed in Abyss gave Satan access to God's private garden. He went there and tempted the humans to join the rebellion, and they went for it. They lost their privileges, too, and were sent to live just upstairs from the Abyss as mortal humans. Upon death, they then went into the ugly part of the Abyss, unless they could find peace with God.
Once we enter the Fallen Realm, this recovering peace with God is the ultimate issue of existence. In the English translations it says something to the effect that "humans began calling on the name of the Lord." There was another rebellion on God's staff and some of them sneaked down to the Abyss so they could mix with humans, producing the Nephilim. These Nephilim provoked humans to some truly hideous wickedness and hindered calling on God. The Flood of Noah was God's response to that. Somehow the Nephilim made a comeback, symbolized by building the Tower of Babel, and God came up with a more long-term solution.
He divided up humanity into nations for each of His elohim council to govern more or less as satraps. Most of them rebelled again and convinced their charges to worship them instead of God. Meanwhile, God took a single individual named Abram (later Abraham) and started His own nation. Not so much in a competition among the elohim satraps, but God did this to demonstrate something.
At that time in history, Hebrew doctrine about Election was that their nation was the Elect/Chosen. Of course, it was obvious that a substantial portion of Israelis didn't embrace that role. Things went back and forth between good and bad leadership and eventually the Israelis were Exiled. At that point, Jeremiah warned them that they -- as the Chosen -- didn't have God over a barrel as they imagined. He had already promised they would lose everything if they kept drifting away from the focus on keeping peace with Him.
They got one lesson from the Exile: Don't do idolatry -- don't worship the elohim. But they lost a lot of other important lessons on the way. Not long after the Return, the majority became permanently lost to the notion of making peace with God because they became convinced it was all about them. They didn't do idols, but they still thought they were the Chosen by birth, which was never true.
The Messiah came and bluntly warned His nation they were off course. They were not at peace with God. One of the things He said was that He came to open the Covenant to all nations. His disciples said the same thing after His Ascension. In Paul's writings in particular, we find out that Election was not what the Israelis first thought. Indeed, it would seem the elohim staff in Heaven were confused by this as well, because Paul uses language to indicate that the gospel of the Messiah was a mystery to them, a secret of sorts.
The mystery was that God had always had Elect in every nation from the very beginning. The big issue was not who they were, but that they existed at all, and that He was going to open up Covenant relations to them all. Thus, Paul enunciates a doctrine of Election in Romans that talks about how God will have mercy on whom He wishes and nothing limits His choices. Meanwhile, national identity meant nothing -- that's what caught the elohim staff off guard.
We cannot know if someone isn't Elect. We can estimate someone is if they manifest the power to exercise faith. But the only person you can be sure of is yourself, and that requires exercising your own faith. If you care what God thinks of you, it's a good place to start. People might worry about it in theory, but if they never find a sense of peace, they aren't there yet.
The whole point of the Doctrine of Election is not to get you focused on going to Heaven. That won't happen until after the Day of Judgment. Instead, you'll go to the spiritual rest of Abraham. That rest is a part of the Hebrew image of Sheol -- paradise and hell, depending on your peace with God when you die. Paul clarified Election wasn't DNA of the flesh that made you children of Abraham, but inheriting his faith. This was a part of the big surprise for the rebellious elohim council members.
Notice what Paul tells us in Romans 8 & 9. He doesn't address going to Heaven; he addresses making peace with God in this life. He talks about Jacob and Esau, and the Exodus Pharaoh, and how they lived, not what happened after they died. That is typical of Hebrew thinking. Nobody in this world really knows about eternity, so whatever we might say will by necessity be symbolic, metaphor, parable.
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