I long for opportunities to demonstrate my faith to those who might not listen to words until they see it.
God has called me to address those with an education and some hope of mental clarity on morality. It’s not that I can’t work with those poorly educated, but my calling on this blog is to address those with the ability to think clearly and live accordingly. Their lives are my primary means of addressing the world, along with mine.
As previously noted here, our single greatest barrier is the inherent stupefication of Western Civilization. The binary logic of the West guarantees moral retardation. It makes it hard for us to even grasp the concept of quantum reasoning, much less allow us to make use of it.
In his best schoolboy Greek grammar, John warns that there is a sort of sin that correlates with spiritual death (1 John 5:13-17). He lacks the both the vocabulary and the necessity for saying it quite that way. What is more obvious is that a large amount of human folly is not necessarily tied to putting your soul in Hell. Such sin will hurt you and damage your testimony; it will screen you from God’s glory. You will lose some of the rich legacy of blessings tied to obeying God’s revelation about His moral character in His creation, but it won’t affect your eternal destiny.
Jesus mentions the unforgivable sin as the other edge of the same sword. If you are so terribly messed up morally that you can blaspheme the Holy Spirit, then it’s pretty certain God has no plans to raise your spirit to eternal life.
It’s hard to explain because today’s Western minds hang too much on the words and ignore the wider context of John’s Hebrew background. Nothing any human can do affects whether their spirits are dead or alive; that is in the hands of God alone. Even though Paul says this quite bluntly in Romans and Ephesians, people still cannot grasp that there are some sins correlating with spiritual death, but none that cause it. Spiritual resurrection is irrevocable as far as we are concerned; God says so quite bluntly, but no one wants to receive it. Not because I can’t offer such information as a fact, but because even my choice of words here can’t be taken as bluntly literal. I’m fighting a literalistic, binary mindset in pointing out the folly of clinging to it.
Thus, my choice to address issues in terms of moral justice. Some things you might choose are not inherently immoral, but foolish in the context. In this sense, folly and sin are rough equivalents. It’s an injustice, even if only to yourself. Investing a vast pool of meaning to the biblical words translated into English as “sin” is what prevents people from understanding on a quantum level. The Hebrew culture uses words as tokens and symbols, not as wagons for payloads. Words cannot contain reality; they point to a path you can wander in hopes of discovering what God placed there for you personally.
I tend to limit my audience here by using a high vocabulary. You who understand it are the ones God has chosen to lead the rest. You are the intellectual shepherds. There are some who will never climb the intellectual heights. We don’t give them words so much as show them. Such people tend to mistake their feelings for a move of the Spirit. It may not be possible to break of them of that tendency, yet they have their place in this world. We must address their needs, too — “feed My sheep” Jesus said. We lead them into the green pastures of God’s justice by how we live. Sheep don’t pay much attention to anything except their limited urges to eat, drink and make more sheep. They follow when the shepherd calls out to get their attention, and then moves. In this real world, I do that myself. Readers can sense that in what I write and absorb the same moral imperatives.
I sincerely hope in the coming days I can have even more opportunities to collect anecdotes of such shepherding.
