Mission Persistence

I teach that there is nothing significant humans can do to affect the choice, timing and process of spiritual birth in themselves or others. That’s about as close as we can come to explaining what’s really going on with individual spiritual redemption. God does what He does with or without us, and as I’ve often noted, in spite of organized Christian religion. There will always be people coming to Christ and seeking ways to live the wordless burning drive that it brings, so there will always be some kind of Christian fellowship, regardless how ill informed it tends to be. What we experience in connection to that is the manifestation of God’s work on our end of the chain; it is not the whole reality. All the more so when our culture does everything possible to keep us from even approaching the thought process God recommended for discussing such things.

We are encouraged to keep the gospel message alive, to take it before the eyes of the world, because that is the context in which God would prefer to bring His power to bear on people He elects to call. He wants us involved in the process, but does not need us. He will most certainly do His work of redemption if we fail, and everything in Scripture tells us we should expect to fail. Westerners do not properly understand how that works and attach a lot of bogus psychology to it because our entire civilization is built on bogus psychology. But we are supposed to carry on with words and deeds that portray at least a sensitivity to spiritual realities. It’s not the gospel sales pitch that does it, but the broader context in which a few words might have some power because God desires to bring His Presence to bear in that context. But in the final analysis, you and I are just along for the ride.

This whole business of Christian living is for our benefit after we have been brought over into the Spirit Realm. While Christian living does tend to reflect the best for all humanity regardless of spiritual state, that is not the point for us. We know it’s in everyone’s best interest, but the stronger motive is to lay claim to the full breadth of joy possible while we are stuck here waiting for His final call to depart this Vale of Sorrow. Wholly inscrutable is His reckoning on why He keeps us here and for how long; our part is the make the most of it by struggling to operate by His recommendations for human existence.

Those recommendations are given shape in the context of the Law Covenants. We are not remanded to the custody of the peculiar code of conduct itself, but to what that code of conduct shows us about something far deeper than mere laws. Those laws point to something fundamental about creation, our fallen nature, and the whole point of it all. It’s just barely possible that mere human intellect could begin to see that moral fabric in our earthly existence, but only if the human intellect develops within a specific context of Hebrew/ANE epistemology. Originally, the idea was to create a human cultural and intellectual context to optimize preparation for that divine call to spiritual awareness, but that fell apart. So God revealed Himself as a human figure, offering a vast lore of clarification about the whole thing, and then paid the price to grant us that spiritual birth before we wade through the human conditioning that makes life worth living. The idea was that we would form communities to begin reclaiming that lost heritage of human conditioning.

Historically, the Christians lost track of that whole idea rather early in the game. That didn’t prevent God continuing His work of redemption, but it has deprived countless generations of Christians of their rich heritage. What’s at stake here is not whether this or that poor benighted soul will go to heaven because we failed, but that said poor soul might be stuck with our monumentally stupid rejection of God’s ways once they do awaken to eternal life. I am hardly the first guy to notice this problem in history, but the message from previous folks has been suppressed by those who consider themselves in charge while having no clue what they should have been doing. I can go back and show you flashes of insight from those who woke up intellectually to some of what God intended for His people, and how they were so deeply blessed by laying claim to the fuller heritage of faith. Hint: It had nothing to do with their theology, but it was something much more subtle and also more substantial.

But it was suppressed. I suppose calling that opposing force “The Cabal” is about as good a label as any other. You probably know that word is connected to Kabbalism, but there is a broad wealth of background information that you probably don’t have unless you read European History and Humanities in depth. There are key terms such as Neoplatonism and Talmudism and so forth that impinge upon a proper understanding of what we face here. It would be very misleading to imagine this thing was highly organized by the people involved, though at times it approached something like that. It’s more accurate to image this thing as a living force that uses people, and that the underlying beliefs and intellectual processes they expressed were somewhat less important than conspiracy theorists imagine. So it’s not like I’m picking on Jews or Catholics, but it would be a lie if I didn’t note that a lot of folks who identified themselves with those labels in history were involved in some really bad stuff against the gospel message. And today a lot of evangelical folks are doing the work to hinder the message by perverting it.

My point is to push away the simplistic nonsense so popular in the West today, nonsense embraced by both the mainstream Joe Sixpack and the folks who imagine they are preparing for Armageddon or something like that. Whatever it is we might associate with my label — The Cabal — is pretty much beholden to Western epistemology. They tend to believe all reality is unitary (bluntly stated by folks like Averroes, a patron saint in Kabbalism) versus my assertion the universe exists inside a bubble of temporal existence, surrounded by an eternity unbounded by space-time considerations. They remain utterly sold on the idea of human politics as the way to get things done. Thus, to organize at all in the Western sense yields them the battlefield of their choice. It’s a trap. The Cabal is hardly omniscient, but the members tend to be well above average intelligence. They are hardly marching in lock-step; that’s just a myth they perpetuate to make us fear. Instead, they are themselves paranoid, even about each other.

I could go on at book length about this, but the point is how very easily we defeat them. Step away from Western Christian stupidity; learn to think like the ancient Hebrew minds. There is no precise definition of that, no particular goal, just think of it as a path that ends when you die. You won’t know until you get there. Learn to think with ultimate reliance on moral intelligence, something that requires using your spiritual faculty to perceive what God intended for you in any given context. Given that our context is moving into a time of tribulation, it’s a good idea to consider whether you are supposed to make noise and take the heat or act rather quietly so you can keep working a while longer. Either way, the gospel is not your sales pitch; it’s your broader approach to living. It’s your mission as a whole, so keep the focus there.