Divine Symbiosis

God acts unilaterally. That’s part of being Creator of all things.
In the matrix of His unilateral decisions, He has decided to place an awful lot of things in our hands. At the same time, He has kept back a lot of things. Our single biggest challenge as those who teach His revelation is helping people understand what He has put in our hands, and what He has not. A critical element in that is understanding we cannot possibly formulate some parts of that, but have to learn to sense it from our spirits.
For example, there are some people with divine appointments, and plenty who appear on our radar without any appointments. Could the Pharaoh of Exodus have found spiritual redemption? That’s the wrong question. In theory, we realize he could have eventually turned things around, but at this point we aren’t even certain who he was, much less how his life ended in spiritual terms. Meanwhile, his divine appointment was to raise Egypt to a climax of power and wealth, only to have it plundered and broken by failure of the sort Egyptians never recorded in their historical records.
The second biggest challenge is getting people to understand the Two Realms — inasmuch as we are going to understand them. I prefer to talk in terms of morality for the lower realm, and spirituality for the higher. I try to keep them in proper perspective, to explain their relative applications. Revelation explains pretty well, for those willing to see it, how repentance under the Laws of God (morality) do not bring us into Heaven directly (spirituality), but are a necessary element in the process. It’s not cause and effect, but much more fuzzy than that. What we do know is people who reject repentance aren’t going to Heaven, because whatever change takes place in spiritual terms, it includes a change of moral consciousness about such things. Spiritual life results in concrete manifestations everyone can recognize on one level or another. Otherwise, we are told it didn’t happen.
Thus, contrasting with Pharaoh we learn about Manasseh (2 Kings 21), the king who gave fifty years of his reign over Judah to the most depraved idolatry imaginable. So deep was the moral darkness, the worship of Molech with the burning of infants returned. The people literally forgot the Covenant. Manasseh’s grandson was shocked when he read a copy of the Covenant of Moses; he’d never heard anything about it. Yet we are also told at the end of his life, King Manasseh repented and turned to the truth. Too late to save the kingdom from God’s wrath, but he saved his own moral destiny. Whether that means he went to Heaven we can’t say, but he did repent.
Two political kingdoms were destroyed as a pretty plain result of God’s wrath against moral failure on a massive scale. Manasseh and Pharaoh defied God’s Laws as applicable to their contexts. Different covenants, different standards in one sense, yet fundamentally the same thing. Each chose to reject the offer of cooperation with God. Paul tells us in his letter to Roman Christians Pharaoh had no choice in some ways, but in the wider revelation of Scripture, we are taught to believe he eventually could have turned and repented at some point. Once his appointment was made, it was up to him. You come to that realization if you read the Bible as a whole.
Life is crappy. There is a certain amount you are handed by God’s unilateral decision. His standards of justice for you are not something you can turn and apply back to Him. You can deal with the God who is, or the god you dream up for yourself. In the latter case, it won’t be too effective.
I tend to care about people because it’s written in my character, but it would not have come to life had I not first been changed by God. Even when there’s nothing I can do, I still feel some of the pain I see in others. That’s the way I am now. While I espouse some esoteric pursuit of God’s glory, admitting up front I can’t always explain what that means, I can more easily explain how that pursuit of His glory makes me care. My caring is constrained by what I understand are the limits He has established for me. Those limits include a constant struggle to explain the things I can, and indicate something about the things I can’t explain. I sincerely do want you to have all the wonders I have, and I have some idea how you might get there.
I can’t do it for you. You have to find your own symbiosis with Him. I’ll do anything and everything I can to get you there, but it’s really in your hands, in the sense you have to work it out with God, not with me. I can’t know if your spirit is alive, and certainly can’t do anything to make that happen, but I figure I have a burden of responsibility to help you on whatever level I can. So I’ll spend a lot of time talking about how I see His Laws working. I’ll do what I can to get you as much as you can have, and my best understanding is that means helping you know and apply His Laws.
I love you because God does.