That Personal Touch

No other force among men on this earth can equal that of family bonds. No one is more influential on you than people close to you.
What made Hitler so powerful? That faux family feeling. The allies who won WW1 were vicious in victory, crippling Germany extraordinarily. The German people feared, and Hitler built on that fear, feeding and fostering greater fear while offering a false solution. Today, almost every Western government is doing the same thing. As we chase the threads of this idea back through history, we see it was not so powerful before the birth of Western Civilization.
The one best legacy of the West is isolation. The one best legacy of Hebrew society was the very opposite of isolation. The whole aim of Moses’ Law was social stability, a sense of safety and support, a context in which the revelation of God would make the most sense. Outside that context, you cannot hope to understand revelation. It goes back farther to the Covenant of Noah. Through Hebrew eyes we see the essential demand from God was for household elders to restrain their wayward children. In case you missed it, a major failure in Eden was Adam’s laziness in his calling as spiritual shepherd. The social stability God was demanding in Noah’s covenant would come with a harsher crackdown from the clan and tribal elders in a world where no other social structure was imaginable. If you didn’t live in an extended family setting, you were fair game for anyone who felt threatened by your presence. Ostracism and isolation was death.
God says that is how it should be until the end of time. We don’t see that easily from our Western perspective because it’s alien to our culture. Satan has succeeded handsomely in nullifying God’s Laws by making them impossible to understand.
Our human nature demands a safety net, a social structure which protects and gives stability. Every social system other than God’s ideal offers only a poor imitation at best. The West fundamentally destroys that tribal structure so that other forces can gain control. The pretense of objectivity, utterly impossible with humanity and worthy of ridicule, renders us all vulnerable to any number of predators. The worst predator of all is non-family government. Under the guise of public order and welfare, the most unimaginable crimes are committed, and people are taught to think of them as “good.”
Nothing — no, nothing — replaces the power of your family influence except the Spirit Realm. That Higher Plane is inherently familial in nature. When you are drawn into the family of God, nothing else on this earth matters. Since most of humanity have no genuine connection to the Spirit Realm, we who have it are obliged by God to emulate the essence of it here on earth. Every evil in human society on earth today hinges on keeping the family out of things, making a virtue of people “standing on their own”. People cannot, do not, and will not ever stand on their own. That is an idolatrous false image of what is possible. God will insist they fall. You can picture it as the nature of things or His active hand, or any combination of the two, but everything raised against God’s divine plan for humanity will fail.
Here on earth, the very closest we can come to a spiritual family structure is not in the blood kinship, but in the covenant. Kinship alone is not enough; covenant trumps kinship. The Law of Noah demands families commit themselves to a covenant of social order — that is the substance of what Scripture says in its own context. Any structure, any legal system or policy, which seeks to reduce the covenant ties among men is an attack on God.
Want to reduce drug abuse? God will support a program in which family reaches out to their own and works with the problem child until they regain that measure of self-control necessary to escape substance addictions. Teach them to lean on family, not their own devices.
Want to reduce tort liabilities and lawsuits? Make every person involved in a company personally responsible for results; remove the legal fiction of corporate “persons”. Require everyone with any portion of ownership to work personally in the business; permit no other forms of investment. This removes the incentive to abuse everyone and anyone for the sake of profit. Yet it does not prevent profit. If the entire operation is family, there can be no union-management conflicts, and abuse of the consumer is much less likely.
This won’t solve every problem, but will reduce them to manageable levels. Even warfare becomes almost sane. If we want any of the good things we claim we desire in this world, we have to radically remake our world by remaking our understanding of what God demands.
Nothing replaces that personal touch.