Otherworldly Messiah

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20 NET)

The context is Paul describing how he convinced Peter to cease clinging to his Jewish instincts. That is, Peter was so highly conditioned by the corrupted Hellenized Pharisaism of his day that he struggled to shed the false view of God. Peter still suffered that aversion to mixing with Gentile Christians. It was not what Moses taught, so the emphasis here is on the Talmudic “Law” of men. In that sense, it is not possible to please God by simple ritual observance. Jesus reinforced Moses, but dismissed the Talmud and all it represented.

Paul’s contention here does not negate the message of Moses. The Gentile Christians under the New Covenant in Christ’s Blood were, in effect, more truly Israel than Peter had been before his conversion to following Jesus. The issue was Peter’s lifelong conditioning at the hands of men who had drifted far, far away from God’s revelation. In answering this problem, Paul states a fundamental principle — quoted above — that travels well outside of the immediate context.

It’s not that Paul ceases to be Paul, but that he has become the Paul that God intended he should be. He is not dissolved into some mystical union, as some would caricature Christian Mysticism, but that he dissolved his broken and fallen humanity in the Blood. If Christ lives in you, then your existence is dominated by a driving commitment to please the Creator. You forfeit your previous human allegiances, concerns and needs, and move into a different level of awareness. You have nothing to fear from all this sacrifice, because One has gone before to open the path with His own sacrifice.

The hardest thing to hammer home to Western Christians is that your children and your dreams of domestic future were all dissolved in the Blood, too. You cannot tacitly demand by instinctive reasoning that God meet your expectations. Yet what we see all day long spewing from the mouths and keyboards of supposed Christians is that God would not dare transgress their Anglo-Saxon cultural mythology. You can get them to disparage that “it’s for the children” type of Nanny-State shaming language, but even the most vociferously “conservative” Christians still act on that very same value system. And that value system is uniquely Anglo-Saxon, totally foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures.

When you assume God cannot ask you to sacrifice your children on the Cross, you blaspheme. When you assume some predetermined channel of allowable outcomes, such that you feel compelled to engage in politics and all the human ugliness of fear and war, you surrender to Satan’s realm and his foul power.

It’s not that any particular choice in front of you is inherently evil in God’s eyes, but that any choice outside His revelation is evil because it’s outside. Whatever it is you might want to imagine about the lineage in our society, it’s the same lying spirit that compelled the Talmud of Jesus’ day (and all of Judaism since then) and drives us to pull away from the mystical life and engage in human politics.

I do not fear political outcomes. I have no need to dirty my hands in any part of that mess, trying to steer it in some preferred direction. I cannot, because God is in control in the first place. You may not like the outcomes, but it’s largely because you do not understand the Ancient Hebrew way of thinking that God prescribed for those who serve Him.

Our nation is not under any covenant offered by God because it rejects them all. Therefore, there is no particle of what see in US law and politics that is blessed in any particular way. (There is a large lore of mythology that our nation was founded on a call from God, but it was formed by people who worshiped an Anglo-Saxon perversion of God.) Every bit of our national politics is outside of His revelation; some of it vociferously rejects His ways. Therefore, our proper understanding is that American political and social affairs are entirely random, in the sense that every thread of it is steered by Satan. While it’s possible that you can detect elements of the bigger picture that seem to align with God’s Word, it’s totally an accident — the essence remains utterly damned. To imagine you can make it better by direct involvement is a delusion from Satan.

And our Lord tells Satan what he can and cannot do with all this power he exerts in American political and social life. God is the ultimate Master of what you see happening. We who follow Christ consciously choose to obey His calling within this chaotic context. If, in the process of our obedience, something in that random ebb and flow of human behavior threatens our human sense of shalom, it cannot justify trying to engage the system. We have no expectation of God sponsoring and empowering a political-social agenda anywhere on the chart. You have from God your calling in faithful commitment to do what He gives you power to do, but He does not give you power to mend or affect the system in any way. That doesn’t mean you don’t interact, as if you could cut yourself off from the reach of human laws and politics. It means you don’t take seriously the claims of the system and don’t operate within those lies.

Instead, you face the system as a resident alien, a citizen and agent of Heaven. You cannot serve two masters. You cannot pretend your citizenship on earth has any meaning when you are called to follow Christ. If you do not understand the inherent conflict between the two, you are morally blind. You have set yourself up for a whole raft of “blessings” from Satan. The Devil owns human politics because our Father has granted it to him. Remember what Satan told Jesus on that high mountain during the Wilderness Temptations? It wasn’t a lie and Jesus didn’t dispute Satan’s authority to make the offer of human political dominion. Jesus opted for a higher allegiance and tossed aside the political Messianic Expectations of the Hellenized and worldly Jewish scholars. Jesus was determined to be an otherworldly Messiah.

If your focus isn’t otherworldly, then you don’t have a Messiah.