01 November 2024
It's a firm doctrine of Scripture: Broadly speaking, human affairs are not under human control. God rules all Creation. He gets what He wants. But the silly notion that God asserts His mastery in every detail is not in the Bible. That's a western obsession, a direct result of Hellenistic influences. What God wants does not require micromanagement and nitpicking compulsion. What God wants is your heart. The details often don't matter beyond that.
That the Bible distinguishes between the Elect and non-elect people should be clue to one thing: There is a mass of humanity for whom there is no hope of redemption after this life. They won't exist in Eternity; they are just foils in a certain sense. Because they cannot be redeemed, they will not respond to the same things that work in the hearts of the Elect. There will always be a majority of humanity that cannot possibly respond to moral and spiritual impulses. Their lives honestly do not matter.
And their presence complicates things for the Elect. This is their world and Satan is their god forever. They will get away with whatever Satan guides them to do. They are background noise for us, and it's a very unpleasant noise. The Devil will ensure that it appears there are no consequences to their sin. They will get away with it, and you will not. God will intimately intervene in your life and it will seem altogether unfair. You must respond to discipline; they are not held accountable.
Yet, God portrays that in the reverse: You hold a high privilege. They have nothing. The call to a higher moral standard is a gift and promise that the non-elect cannot comprehend. God talks to you; He does nothing in particular for them.
They are Satan's distraction to knock you off track. Do you realize that the one thing the Devil really wants to do is deny us our covenant privileges? That's all he really cares about (as far as we are concerned). Everything he is doing with humanity at large is rooted in his obsession with keeping us away from Eden. And he knows that the Covenant is the path back to Eden.
There was never anything he could have done about our Election and our eternal destiny. The only thing he could possibly hope to affect is whether we get to enjoy our covenant privileges while we live. Every temptation is aimed at knocking us off that path. He already owns the non-elect, so tempting them is simply not an issue. Instead, he guides them (with no difficulty at all) to actions that interfere with our faith.
God says the wicked will suffer. Do you understand the bottom line on that? They don't have our divine moral sensibilities. They don't have our enlightenment, our awareness of spiritual issues. They are blind and eternally dead already. That in itself is punishment enough. If you start demanding a fleshly component to that, you are off track. That means you are operating on their level, where Satan wants you. If you keep paying attention to the fleshly level of things, then you are within the Devil's grasp, serving his purpose.
It's a lie of Satan that humanity is all the same, that there is no Divine Election. As long as your mental focus agrees with that assumption, you will never escape; you will never enjoy the blessings of the Covenant.
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