Moral Power

Divine justice is reality. It is not a restraint in the sense that you cannot sin, but that you cannot understand what sin is, nor the consequences of sin, without understanding God’s Laws. Everything He did in Creation follows His character and the Law Covenants are simply expressions of His character.

When He worked through humans to reveal His character, there stood a set of common assumptions that were part of that revelation. God built a society and intellectual context for His revelation, and we live in a society and intellectual context that is far removed from that. Our assumptions about reality are alien to God’s revelation. We tend to think of Law as legislation, whereas Scripture presents Law as a loving personal imperative. God portrays Himself as an Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) sheikh, and our natural element as humans is ANE feudalism. ANE feudalism is how we are designed to operate, and it reflects the fundamental design of Creation, or reality itself.

The critical point of Adam in the Garden was not that he worked, but that he was God’s servant as caretaker. The powerful bond of love between God and man was fully engaged and Creation acknowledged it, depended on it. Nature didn’t need fixing but guidance. Adam was instinctively compliant with God’s character and his mere presence was an expression of God’s Presence. His faithful commitment to God’s character was his power to shape the Garden. He communed with Creation in ways we can scarcely imagine in our current world. If all the Garden did was feed Adam and Eve, that would have been enough, because it was God’s provision for their existence — His Garden for His Life in them. His Laws are a part of that gracious provision.

God has done everything necessary and useful in revealing Himself to us. We can know as much about Him as we desire, and that’s the whole point. Without that desire to be His child and to represent His interests, we have no life here. We have mere existence. It becomes the painful fight to survive wherein we shall eat our bread by the sweat of our brows. The importance of the Curse is not the legislative fact of the Fall, but how it represents alienation from God’s rich provision. You can stumble around trying to intellectually discern how nature works, or you can embrace God’s character and let nature work for you.

The crazy part of this is that Adam and Eve had all of that from the start. Yet, somehow Satan convinced them that it was some kind of insult to be told what’s real and morally right in this world, when they were such finer stuff and capable of judging what was real and right from their own faculties (see Genesis 3). What Satan didn’t tell them was how such a decision to become one’s own god was tantamount to shutting down the heart and the spirit and ignoring their communion with God. The power comes from the love of God; you cannot demand that love on your own terms. This is why the Garden no longer fed them, and Adam had to eat by the sweat of his brow, and nature resisted him. You might say he lost the understanding of how to eat the thorns that had always been there, and certainly had no idea how to guide them any longer.

But a critical part of the curse is revealed in what God said to Eve. Previously, the two were united in their natural understanding of their roles as husband and wife. In their embrace of human faculties, they lost that unity because it cannot be found in the intellect. It can only come from the heart and its communion with the spirit-Spirit nexus. The sensory heart isn’t just about nature, but our human nature as well. All of our talk about the heart in matters of romance only confuses things because as Westerners we have no clue what the heart is and how it works. We use a deeply and disgustingly perverted symbolism that cripples our understanding of reality. The heart is not the seat of emotions and cathexis; the heart is a higher intelligence than the mind, a sensory organ that connects directly to the living Spirit of God.

Cathexis is not love, but unguided affection. It is raw emotion and hormones. It is the power to pervert your life and destroy you, making you an enemy of nature. All that business of pagan magic has been pursuit of what Adam and Eve lost in the Garden. It’s the wrong path, attempting to sidestep the Flaming Sword. There is only one way back into the Garden and that is the revelation of God’s character that Adam and Eve cast aside. Included in the rich and sweet life of Eden was the immense and powerful love that bound Adam and Eve together, and gave them mastery of their world.

With my books and previous posts here, we have plenty of chatter about the falsity of feminism and social mythology arising from the dreary Germanic Tribal folklore. The entire range of Western Civilization is deeply infected with a foul heathen deception. What we have not explored much so far is the vast moral power of God’s Laws in understanding sexual identity. Yeah; there’s more coming on this.