His Call
Our Divine Sheikh owns us.
You have to wipe away the idiocy of thinking you could possibly be free. That’s a myth peculiar to the West. All living beings are accountable to someone else, and eventually we are all accountable to God. It won’t matter if you want to imagine there is anything above Him to which He is accountable; that has no effect on us. We are accountable to God and there is no appeal over His head for us. This is His game alone. God reveals Himself as the Lord and we are His property under the customs of ANE feudalism.
That particular brand of feudalism is not an accident; God created that system to reflect how the universe is made. This kind of feudalism is intensely personal. The only way to depersonalize it is to make yourself a lesser slave, someone who stays out of sight and does the most menial and nasty jobs. Rising to a higher status means taking the time and effort to become personally close to Him. He freely offers to every human the opportunity to become His adopted child, but it requires embracing the role of His child.
In the Hebrew world, context is everything; among humans that means role is everything in any particular moment. Notions of fairness, equality and rights are all from Hell; they are excuses for fighting what God has decreed. You can choose to be His child, but you cannot choose where He places you. That was decreed before you were born. The best you can do is draw near to Him and discern, and then embrace the role for which He designed you.
But that divine calling is hardly static. It’s not as if you can’t fight apparent fate. His inscrutable ways include conditioning us for things we hardly understand. He holds all the cards; ask Job — some things are not for us to know. Rather, we seek to know from Him what He wants us to fight and what He says we must accept. None of that comes by objective policy or nice little slogans. There are commonalities, but the logic remains fuzzy. For humans, the primary means of awareness is in the will, the sense of conviction.
You are hard-wired with a sense of divine necessity; it is not subject to any human logic. Our reception within the conscious mind of the signals may well be perverted by cultural conditioning, but the signals do not fail. If we learn to understand those signals, we come to the realization of our own personal collection of moral imperatives. There are some things we simply must not do, or our souls will burn with unholy punishing fire. By the same token, there are some things we simply must do. That He communicates this way is not subject to debate: If you are human, you have a divine call and you can know it. Your role is defined by the contextual steering of your convictions.
Your calling is not subject to any other human authority. However, your actions and duties may be circumscribed by the necessities of their calling and role in the context. Everyone has their own role within any domain. It requires an awareness that conflict is inevitable, not because God can’t get it together, but because conflict is part of the Fall. The art of obedience is learning how to gracefully handle those conflicts. Some of them are simply tests.
Love is the Law of God. Again, it’s not the feeling from love, but the commitment to care. Your actions within your calling and role must run through that filter of divine moral imperative that you embrace the welfare of others as He does, as He defines welfare. Love defines the business of Heaven and the limits of your authority within the calling and role. The notion of absolutes that apply to all humans at all times is not a biblical concept, not part of biblical morality. There are some actions inherently evil, but we cannot view them with Western eyes or we’ll never understand how to obey God.
If you don’t obey Him, you don’t love Him enough. If you sincerely desire to please Him, you cannot fail.
