Contagious Truth

The starting point is recognizing the failure of Western assumptions about truth. Truth is a Person; the notion of some objective thing out there that embodies pure truth is the greatest lie of Satan. The search for truth is inside your soul, not somewhere out there. There can never be even the possibility of objective truth that becomes collectively self-evident to any group of truth-seekers. The sum total of all factual knowledge correctly understood is still not truth. Truth is a Living Person who transcends this universe.

Truth will always remain personal. This is the ultimate elevation of the individual before God, because the whole issue is not laying hold of some mythical objective standard, but gaining His approval. Inherent in this truth is the assertion that it can be done. God has revealed in a thousand ways that you can gain His acceptance. The paradox of divine election is that it will always be on His initiative, yet He holds it forth as something within our reach. The moment you subject this to Western analysis, you will miss it. Not just make a mistake, but you will have tragically blundered away from it and closed the door behind you. God has always said, “Come to me” — making it clear there is some choice in it for you.

That we are stuck in this fallen plane of existence means we cannot actually touch His face until we escape. We refer to standing before Him in the parabolic sense, not literal. Our sole reason for living is to carry His Presence (truth) wherever we go and to make it as obvious to others as this existence allows. A critical element in that revelation of His glory is that it not appear to be objective, that our work in revealing Him be quite apparently otherwise. It must of necessity be confusing and paradoxical; it must not be reasonable. Not unreasonable in some overtly insane fashion, but we make it subtle.

There are times we do, indeed, thrust it in someone’s face, but the default mode is a presentation that only a few will notice. We must be ever ready to use words to explain that truth is inherently contextual in the sense of how it is expressed in human behavior.

This is why I often juxtapose talk of the gentle loving shepherd with the violent man capable of killing. On the one hand, I’m trying to shatter the myth that life is precious and sacred, a lie that arises entirely from human fear of the unknown. It is not peculiar to the West, but surely dominates all Western assumptions. Even when you get a Westerner to talk of being brave in the face of death, you still completely miss the ANE comfort with dying when the context calls for it. There was a time when you might have seen a good measure of that otherworldly spirit in Western Christianity, but that has almost died out over the course of my own lifetime.

As a starting point, we set out to offer the truth of God’s love. However, that word “love” is very poorly defined, almost slanderously perverted in our Western world. The truth of God’s love is love for God, with people as the recipients of that love. Human life is a tool for revelation, not the objective. We love God through loving what He created, and central to Creation is the human soul. Not love as Western minds presume, but we love as ANE minds would see it — that means an awful lot of effort striving to change our understanding of things. We are obliged to retrain the mind to stop formulating truth and confine itself to simply interpreting it. Love is whatever God says it is, not what your analysis would like to make of it. God said He loved His Creation enough to destroy some parts of it at certain pivotal moments when those parts had drifted too far away into a perversion He would not tolerate any longer. He sometimes chose other people to perform that destruction.

That those doing the killing suffered a major dose of arrogance was not the point, but a separate issue for which God had plans. That His sacrificial love for humans included sacrificing some to the stringent imperatives of His Laws is the key to understanding truth, revelation and love. Yes, things have changed somewhat, but the Laws of God still apply to all of humanity so long as we have rainbows in the sky. Christ did not change the character of God’s revelation and truth. He clarified it, including using a whip to cleanse the Court of Gentiles. It included interposing His own flesh into the legal penalties so that He could begin to reclaim some parts of humanity long neglected by His nation in their failed mission of revelation. He didn’t change God’s Laws, but came to teach how they are fulfilled.

The Cross did not end the necessity of taking the lives of those who threaten what His Laws require. How many times did Jesus warn people they deserved to die if they didn’t step back from sin? How horrific did He have to make it, talking of tossing folks alive into the burning garbage pits in the Hinnom Valley? Mythologizing Jesus into today’s metro-sexual nice guy is blasphemous, but so is attempting to make Him a closet Nazi. He was a Hebrew man, the ultimate expression of ANE culture, utterly foreign, alien to our Western minds.

If you don’t see how biblical records of genocide are part of God’s love for His creation, you cannot pretend to understand Christ on the Cross. For you to take up your own cross and follow Him is to reject the values of this Western world and embrace death as the final kiss of love from God in this world. You may have a calling that stays your hand from bloodshed, but Scripture does not condemn bloodshed itself. That’s just a common false assumption read back into Scripture. The New Testament pointedly condemns being too quick to kill, too eager for it. That’s what you get when you have stern legalistic applications of human law. You can go too far and find yourself in Noah’s day where anything goes, and that was evil, too. The condemnation is for those who seek to replace God’s truth with anything else.

Could I pull the trigger? As a shepherd, I must be able. His rod (Law) and staff (spiritual leadership) comfort me. Human nature means some humans will prey on others, and there comes a point where God’s Laws still say they have to stopped by whatever means necessary. While such holy protection may be buried in a flood of human murderous conduct, it does not weaken our duty to His truth. We spread His truth on His terms, not according to our own logic.