Apparently, someone needs this message again.
First, let’s stop approaching this from from the Western viewpoint. See it from the Hebrew mind of Christ. Jesus was by no means a Western man and Western thinking is hostile to His message. I wrote books on the subject, so let’s move on. To be biblical is to be rooted in the Hebrew Mystical intellectual background. The Hebrew message was always a matter of using the concrete to point to the abstract. Abstract meant the Spirit Realm, Heaven, the plane of existence beyond this world; it did not mean the rational ideal, because that was some mythical nonsense cooked up by some pagan fools in Greece.
Evangelism goes all the way back at least as far as Noah. His message was the ancient roots of God’s Moral Law and comes to us in the rather sketchy image of the Covenant of Noah. Jewish tradition fills in some blanks, but you have to take Judaism with a grain of salt; it was Hellenized sometime before Christ. He rejected the changes and they killed Him for pointing out their mistakes. Nonetheless, we find the Forerunner and Jesus both preaching the same message: “Repent!” That was evangelism.
What was Peter’s message there in Jerusalem just days after the Ascension of Christ into Heaven? “Repent!” The business of “you must be born again” was not a command; it was a conditional statement. For Nicodemas or anyone else to understand what Jesus was teaching, it was necessary to be Spirit-born. Spiritual birth was the necessary condition to understanding. To understand the full importance of repentance, it was necessary to be born from above. To recognize how Jesus was correcting a false understanding of Moses and restoring the Justice of God, you had to lay hold of that mystical connection to the Spirit Realm. It was necessary to reach outside this universe and connect to the Spirit of God in Heaven in order to truly see what was happening in this world, and to truly understand what the written Word was saying about it all.
Paul made no bones about it: Nothing any human can do will change your eternal status. The human soul cannot even want spiritual birth. God, and God alone, is the initiator of all things and that means spiritual change as well. Nowhere in Scripture does it say, “invite Jesus into your heart” or any other words to that effect. The message of evangelism has always been, “Repent from your sins!” There is a difference and we need to get it right.
The church founded by Jesus was not established to go out and bring people into Heaven. Again, nothing any human can do will change your spiritual nature. No one can choose spiritual birth. Decision Theology is a blasphemous lie. We come into this world spiritually dead by default, and God alone can breathe His Spirit into our dead spirits. He pointedly avoided explaining how He decided one person received it and another did not. That’s His business and no one is fit to judge Him on that matter. What’s left is living by His moral character as revealed in His Word. If you don’t have His power, you can’t do it in the first place. However, our message is that folks should repent and seek to embrace His moral standard so we can fully claim our divine heritage. You surely can know if you are born again, but no other person can know for you. All they can know is whether God wants them to work with you; nothing more can they know and nothing more matters.
Biblical living is seeking to understand God’s moral character woven into His Creation and living accordingly. Biblical evangelism is inviting others to join us. It’s just that simple, folks. Our whole message is to love people regardless of their flaws and failures simply because we have that divine power to do so. Our spiritual eyes show us how to bring that sacrificial love of the Cross into life in our existence so that we reveal the moral fabric. People can be blind to it culturally, in which case we take the time to deconstruct our damned Western blindness and mythology. That’s what biblical teaching is all about: We destroy the man-made garbage that seeks to displace the truth of the Bible. At some point, people who are spiritually alive will catch fire and embrace it. Those who aren’t may still find something that calls to them and — who knows — God may then breathe life into their souls. He never told us how it works. He told us how we should work.
Please, folks, throw away that failed theology that has created so many senseless disputes and divisions. There is only the biblical narrative and spiritual mysticism. Everything else is man-made failures. Eternal salvation is a decision only God can make. Walking in righteousness is what we are offering. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not how to be born again.
The gospel message is that the sacrifice has been made once for all; what’s left is accepting that price and claiming the divine heritage of walking in His power until we leave this world.
This post continues in the next post.
