What Do You Expect?
We stand ever ready to offer God’s truth.
A critical part of the reason God leaves us here is so that we can reveal His moral character. Yes, that starts with the gospel message, but it hardly ends there. If all we do is pure evangelism, so to speak, we have stolen from people the blessings God meant for all of mankind to have. They won’t all get it, but those capable of hearing the truth should have it. We live in this world and reject it; we embrace His revelation as packaged in the Hebrew mindset. By His Spirit discern how the Bible applies to our context, and then we talk about it. We trust His Spirit to help others discern how our experience in the Kingdom Life can apply to them.
One size does not fit all. In every human institution we see the dehumanizing laziness of those in power unwilling to meet people where they are. That is Satan’s version of you doing only what God has given you power to do. Learn the difference. You can only give what God gives you for the purpose, but you can’t pretend your choice works for everyone, and God forbid you become arrogant enough to insist it should work for everyone. Consider all the ways in which we steal the unique stamp of God from every human individual and work to repeal that sin.
At the same time, God hard-wired us for tribal cohesion. When God’s version is denied, people replace it with the self-indulgent version. You should expect folks to be nervous around people who aren’t like them. This is entirely natural, not evil in itself, but typically evil in how it is implemented. That turf-oriented defensiveness is in itself right, because that’s how God made us. We have to learn how it helps us perceive the domain boundaries of our calling, to abstract it into contextual meaning of the limits God places on us. To imagine these instincts can be trained out of the human soul is a lie from Hell; fighting it may warrant violence. To seek their proper use in the Kingdom of the Spirit is wisdom.
The human lust for power and control is nothing more than a combination of the natural fear of humans for untamed natural conditions, plus the impulse to be one’s own god. The fundamental nature of the Fall itself was usurping the throne of the soul from God, and elevating human decision to His place. It’s not a whole lot different from what got Lucifer in trouble. The logical root is arguing with God about anything that He has to say. Virtually all oppression is simply playing God and rejecting His revelation. It inevitably includes rejecting what He says is normal for fallen humans.
Holy cynicism expects this. On the human plane, nothing can undo the Fall. You can’t even fix your own sinful nature, so get used to human failure. With Christ, we hold open the door to divine escape from this prison, but we are hardly disappointed when the majority in any given context rejects it. This leaves us living in the tension of a whole world of evil demanding we sink back into the madness, pulling at us even as God leads us out. Without a clear-headed recognition of what He says is true in Heaven and how it applies on this earth, we cannot hope to find a path here that please Him. Our whole existence is bringing His light into the darkness. We make war on the evil spiritual powers behind what our fleshly eyes see. We do not make war on people, but give them all the room we can so they can fail.
Intervention with children requires a certain amount of force to keep them sprinting off the edge of cliff. They don’t know they can’t fly. To the degree someone older volunteers to live in a covenant that grants you some authority over them, you treat them somewhat the same as your child, recognizing their personal limitations. Even a literal son or daughter can find a way to kill themselves because you can’t be omnipresent or omnipotent in their lives. Even less so do we control how things go with covenant children. The fundamental element is a loving acceptance of God’s order of things. You cannot assert total control over things, and it is Satanic to try.
Some of the worst oppressions in history have come from nominal Christians. The fundamental element is the Lordship of Christ. If the individual in our care does not recognize God as God, there is little we can do. In ancient Israel, the one who rejected the Covenant of Moses could always choose to live as a Gentile. They lost covenant protections, but they weren’t automatically enemies. We can choose to extend the love of God to those who reject that love because the sacrificial compassion of Jesus trumps their response. Love is not defined by a specific set of actions; that’s the worst of Western mythology. Love within the context may mean entirely opposite actions from the next context.
You may not have the calling from God to prophesy individually, but we as a covenant community must prophesy to a fallen world in the net effect of our words and actions. We still live as humans on this plane, but we are driven by an entirely otherworldly source. Our human thoughts and actions are tempered from a divine fire. On the human level, we recognize injustice, not simply by the effects, but in the spirit of the thing.
We know that civil governments will always overreach and transgress God’s limits. We must depend on Him to reveal the false spirit of such actions in light of our individual callings to know how to react to His glory. No two of us will have the exact same perception and imperatives, though we could in theory share a great deal when we take the time to associate with those whose calling is similar. We make room for each of other to do things differently, even things that strike us as completely wrong, because we aren’t inside their heads and can’t know what God demands of them. There is no possible way we can all snap to the same response in the face of evil.
Here are some common areas of senseless conflict.
Poverty is a symptom of human evil. You are siding with the Devil when you reduce the problem to a single cause. Any particular person’s plight is always a combination of their sin and the sins of others. God will not sponsor taking wealth by force from one sinner only to give it to another sinner. Righteous people do not take by force, and refuse to accept wealth taken by force from another. The answer is not a matter of absolute this or that, but what God has given you to do right now. To advocate for any solution that ignores the moral truth is a lie. Do your work and mind your own business; give where God prompts you whatever it He prompts you to give. Sometimes you are called to disengage and move away because Satan has been granted power over the whole thing. The problem is humans have rejected God’s provision, so there is no possible solution working through a damned system. You have to work around it.
Crime is normal; it cannot possibly be wholly eradicated. It is very easy to forget the goal of social stability and make enforcement actually more destabilizing than the crime. As it is, virtually every common law on the books throughout the West is merely one cultural group demanding everyone else submit to their social prejudices. It’s bad enough we rip the Ten Commandments completely out of context so that we really have no clue that they mean. While the Ten Commandments to tend to reflect God’s moral demands, they are actually not entirely applicable outside of Moses. But what’s worse is, if you embrace the Decalogue, you have to embrace the whole Law of Moses. You don’t get to pick and choose. You cannot rely on Western social instincts to get the right answer on anything. Use the Law of Moses as a guide to deeper moral principles, as Jesus explained more than once. Meanwhile, you should always expect a secular government to make the most insufferable demands. That something is illegal under civil law is a tactical concern, not a moral concern.
The very existence of a civilian police force is a deep offense to God. In the Bible, the people are the police, assigned to restrain their own kin within their tribal social boundaries, and kept peace with other tribes by taking responsibility for the sins of their own. You cannot pass the buck and hire some third party to enforce the laws for you. That’s a rejection of God’s Laws. Again, we have policemen and it is a mere tactical consideration. Only by random accident does that badge represent an agency for moral good. These days, a policeman is increasingly likely to serve evil purposes more than good.
Punishment from an evil system of laws and corrupt enforcement cannot ever resemble justice. We make all kinds of self-righteous noise about slavery, but we confine people in warehouses without even the redemptive purpose of meaningful work. Compared to our prisons, biblical slavery is downright nice. As it now stands, most prison systems run by Western governments constitute obscene torture in God’s eyes, and not one bears even a superficial resemblance to biblical morality. The entire system – law, investigations, adjudication, sentencing and implementation of the sentences – is anathema to God.
Environmental pollution is a moving target because it is utterly impossible for human science to ever understand the whole picture. Scientists are fallen sinful creatures like everyone else. Every theory and concept has been shown mistaken sooner or later. A scientific consensus is one of the worst foundations for any public policy, certainly no better than mere economic convenience or profligate disregard of nature. It will always be a mere football in that never-ending quest for temporary oppressive authority. God owns His Creation and is fully willing and able to show you what pleases Him with whatever information you have right now. Study it if your conscience demands it, but live by your own conscience and hold a knife to your throat before you dare suggest to anyone else what they need to do. Never forget: God said this entire universe is disposable, and He can heal any part on any level at His whim. He seldom bothers to consult us on these things.
In every issue, the greatest danger is, as noted previously, allowing ourselves to be unequally yoked with those who reject God’s moral authority. It’s a constant temptation to engage some political effort to change something that God has granted to Satan’s control. There will ever be a significant portion of your existence within Satan’s domain and God will gladly help you understand when, where and how to resist. He will use human behavior, individually and in any aggregate, but His character can be found only in ANE feudalism as a system for restraining human sin. Secular politics requires you first kneel before Satan, as we saw in the Wilderness Temptations of Jesus.
You cannot demand that God bless something He said was evil, and you cannot rewrite the Bible from your human prejudices.
