In the first century, it took significant funding for a handful of guys and gals to wander from town to town and present the gospel message. That was how you spread a new idea, by traveling to the next place and standing in the town square. That’s where people got their news and it was hardly more reliable than it is today. However, the entertainment effect was quite powerful because entertainment itself was very expensive.
Today we have a glut of entertainment and it buries the gospel. Too often the gospel is perverted to fit whatever prevails as entertainment, but even that is nearly drowned out in the noise of a whole world free to communicate with the rest of the world. So the gospel has never been easier and cheaper to share, and it has never been so hard to hear. The most powerful gospel message is the one you act on moment by moment, but we can’t take our entire life online for display. We have to allow the true message to seep through the tiny thin slice of ourselves that we can transmit through various computer devices.
I don’t think anyone foresaw this situation, but predators are typically more adaptive than the herds. We have failed Christ’s mandate to be wise as serpents. People keep forgetting that Paul was so very effective precisely because he knew how the predators thought and how they operated. The whole world would soon be subverted by the predators who made him what he was. There is a sense in which the world today is dominated by a particular predatory approach that was refined and honed by Judaizers. Their mindset and methods have set the pattern for what threatens us today. To a lesser agree, we still contend with their specific agenda, which itself has passed through many generations of adjustments and adaptations. It’s never so simple as we would like it, but complex and subtle. We have to be wise as the serpents, a symbolic way of saying we have to understand how Satan operates through those who serve him, knowingly and otherwise.
But we are harmless like a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit. Our presence rests lightly and brightly. God uses us because that’s the whole purpose of redemption. He hardly needs us and has often acted without human aid, even in spite of it. Paul used the Roman highway system, which included the regulations on the ships that connected the roads across waters. We use the Internet. Paul used Roman Law to protect his mission; we use the Internet protocols. We sincerely hope our message results in a very rich change in meat space life, but we are so few and so thinly spread that genuine meat space fellowship is simply not available right now. The God who calls me has required me to operate in this way, so I embrace it until He provides another way. It’s just a tool. We who sense a calling to use this tool as our Roman roads still have to remain wise to the Devil’s tricks as they manifest in this environment.
We still have to watch out for the presence and work of whomever has inherited and embraced the mission of the ancient Judaizers. We have to recognize them by what and how they communicate online, because they seldom wear any of the standard labels these days. On top of that, they have largely succeeded in taking over the system by now, something that the Apostles didn’t face, though at least John foresaw it coming. That’s what the Apocalypse was all about; we are living what his extended parabolic prophecy foretold. So we face the Beast in government and the Harlot in our religious organizations. It’s not so obvious that we can point to this or that religious institution and call it the Harlot, but that her influence can be felt in every organization to one degree or another. Don’t be simplistic, but know them by their fruit. None of us escapes at least some degree of slavery to those forces, but their chains cannot touch the Spirit or hinder the Kingdom of Heaven.
The fundamental nature of spiritual birth and moral awareness negates their power by moving operations completely beyond their reach. Satan was cast out of Heaven and isn’t allowed to operate on that level. His power is in blinding folks to that level. A critical element in Spirit-led moral awareness is shedding the Devil’s brand of morality, which happens to be anything except the one God revealed. This is where we plug in my anti-Western rants about Aristotelian epistemology and Anglo-Saxon mythology. See the book linked on the lower right side of this blog page if you don’t have a clue about that. The point is that you can’t rely on Western society to provide a proper frame of reference for what is moral. Western society, in effect if not in the particulars, is the general result of humanity and human institutions steered by the Devil’s servants. It wasn’t his creation, but something he hijacked and perverted to his use.
We can’t leave it, but we can surely disconnect and cling to an awareness far above this mess.
