Lately I’ve run into people who just don’t grasp the most basic assumptions behind the Law Covenants in the Bible. As always, we have to start from the assumption God nurtured and created a specific language and culture after the Fall, building a frame of reference in which to reveal Himself to fallen mankind. While a culture can include a lot of trash, and plenty of things which are simply contextually derived from the roots, we must grasp the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) Hebrew culture, essentially founded in the life of Abraham, as the single point of reference, the fundamental matrix of assumptions, the one proper intellectual framework and viewpoint, on which all revelation is built.
We know about things prior to Abraham because he was the one who carried the knowledge, and he is the one who interprets what they mean. He was a scholar among his own kind, educated in the vast array of ancient literature no longer available to us. When the Lord called him and brought his spirit to life, he was in the unique position of setting the precedent on what is necessary to operate under the Spirit of God. That he failed at points serves only to verify that, in that how he failed shows how it works. Paul points out there is a dual legacy from Abraham, one earthly and one spiritual. The latter is what really matters, but is hard to know unless we grasp something of the former.
Moses was another gatekeeper. His gate was much narrower. His mission was to insert into the stream of history a very specialized expression of God’s revelation on the level of the earthly, a covenant of Laws. His work served to filter Abraham’s legacy for a particular purpose, and his forty days with God on Mount Sinai included editorial guidance on what to write among the various threads of oral legacy handed down from Abraham. What Moses left for us in the Torah was a distillation, something which assumed the reader would read between the lines in order the grasp the nature of the Domain of the Spirit.
His primary focus was the part any fallen man could grasp, the Covenant of the Law as the gateway to the Spirit. Even in his legal writing, with a literal application in the rituals of the Covenant, the first generation to read this Law Covenant read it from the mystical ANE Hebraic approach. They might struggle to use the symbolic language, but there was no doubt their cultural background presumed a higher meaning to all such literature.
The baldly literal approach of the Pharisees in Jesus’ day were the result of a cultural shift, drifting away from the intellectual culture of Abraham and Moses. That slippage came in stages, beginning with the sins of Jeroboam, which wallowed in the fundamental temptation to be inclusive of the local pagan rituals. The Canaanites spoke a similar language, and their rituals were quite familiar to the Hebrew nation. Jeroboam said, in essence, the distinction between Jehovah and the Baal/Ashtarte collection was of no significance. Then there was the broad human political wisdom of statecraft. The Northern Kingdom became quite adept, but also quite evil at the same time. Once that bunch was taken away because of that evil, Judah was stupid enough to chase the same human wisdom.
In the Exile which resulted from their sin, Judah was introduced to the vast depth of ancient religious literature which had always been kept in the libraries of Mesopotamia, from which background Abraham went out. They bought into the worldly wisdom of that broad education and the religious assumptions of the Babylonian Imperial house. Then came the Medo-Persian conquest and their peculiar assumptions under Zoroastrianism. The latter introduced a very intellectual frame of reference that all deities were on the same team, but it also brought in a very hedonistic money-based view of life. It was like a one-two knockout punch against the Abrahamic culture: Babylon’s ancient ethos that everything in heaven and earth had a price in gold, and Persia’s expansion on that same idea with the notion rulers could be inherently divine in a certain sense, and the Hebrews were ripe for Satan’s harvest.
The returnees in a short time ended up with a greedy, worldly Messianic expectation of political world conquest. It was their destiny from God’s hand to own all the wealth of the world, and be masters over all humanity, enslaving everyone who wasn’t a Son of the Law. But it was Law for which they no longer had a good fundamental grasp. Along comes Greek rationalism in the wake of Alexander’s conquests and this was the final stake in the heart of Hebraic culture. It wasn’t simply the Pharisees, but the entire range of Judean leadership — nobles, priests, scholars, etc. — were deeply enamored with the analytical rationalist approach of Aristotle and friends. And while they tried to keep their mystical grasp of God, that mysticism was so thoroughly compromised; it was at best a caricature of how Abraham viewed things.
They exchanged deep mysticism for shallow abstract logic, symbolism for mere allegory, and the divine ineffable truth in parabolic language became a baldly literal legalism. The Bible cannot be read with a literal mindset, or you will miss everything that matters. When God’s ancient declarations seem contradictory, it’s because you are mired in a concrete logical frame of reference while trying to read a symbolic mystical revelation.
When you approach it properly, you realize there is no way a fallen human on this earth can possibly hope to grasp the Divine from mere human intellect. That intellect is fallen, damaged, entirely subject to the failures of sinful nature. The very nature of the Fall was choosing to put human intellect on the throne of life’s choices, versus enslaving the intellect to serve the spiritual element. That choice in the Garden killed the spiritual link which was our birthright. Only God can restore it. When He does, you spend the rest of this life struggling to reconstruct the dominance of the spirit over the mind, much as the mind must dominate the flesh.
A critical element in that renewed order of things in the human soul is the realization you cannot reconcile all the apparent paradoxes and discontinuities of Scripture until your spirit rules your mind. That mind must be renovated under the ANE Hebraic mystical orientation of Abraham, so it can better learn to implement the unspeakable strategies of the Spirit of God delivered in the spirit He births. God’s Laws are not God. They are mere manifestations of someone who cannot be contained in words, thoughts of the intellect, or any other part of this fallen world. God can command His servants to do something which is ostensibly contrary to His Laws because His Laws cannot possibly contain the whole truth of what God demands of humanity. Yes, that is a very dangerous place to stand, because men with evil in their hearts can use that as an excuse for all sorts of nastiness. People who walk in the spirit will know the difference. That is God’s promise.
The tension between the Laws on one hand, and the inexpressible demands of the Spirit on the other, is the place God has built for His people. Get used to it. A final and all encompassing objective standard is not going to happen. Your standard is Jesus Christ, a Person. You cannot objectify the living Son of God.
