Paint Your Own Picture

Don’t ape the particulars; strive for the essence.

You and I cannot be genuinely Hebraic, nor should we desire it. The context of that era is long gone in human experience. The people who bore it naturally threw it away and we are left with mere shreds and hints of what it may have been. Instead, we have only the cream of their national literature.

Apparently this is enough. Paul told us that we aren’t supposed to absorb the whole context, but to find ourselves buried in the pages of Scripture. Such was the meaning of the admonition to be a workman not ashamed, able to accurately shave off the context that doesn’t apply to us. We can learn the meaning of the Word in our own personal context and discern the thoughts and intentions of our hearts.

The problem is that we also have to shave a lot of our own context, as well. This is why I champion the Hebraic image, because until you recognize what it is the separates us from our best understanding of the Ancient Hebrew, you cannot begin to recognize what does and doesn’t matter in your own context. I’ve offered hints in my fiction writing of what I imagine it could be if we were to find that special place the Hebrews held within our own time and place in history. However, it is not for me to steer the masses to a future cultural nirvana that would replicate the same power and presence in human history.

Rather, I call out to those able to hear that we must all find our own unique place largely because the Savior has promised He would not interfere much in human history. Instead, He moved the focus out of this world so that we could sanely abstract what the Hebrew nation could have had, and perhaps did have now and then at points in her story. The whole point is that we do not have to purchase with our lives the Hebrew identity as the single best representation of serving God. He came to bring all people nigh to the Father’s throne, all on the same terms, terms for which Hebrew identity was merely a parable.

So the big problem here is spending enough time delving into the Hebrew identity as those people were until we begin to get a sense of where we can and should be. I don’t have a cool name for it, something that would splash down in the middle of global human awareness. We start from the assumption that such cannot happen and we shouldn’t want it. Merely desiring that is an artifact of our own damned culture. I’m calling it Hebraic only because we have to start somewhere, and identifying a first way-point on the journey is the best way to get moving.

Please don’t assume I’m all about returning to the Hebrew world. Sometimes I’ll mask that by referring to the Ancient Near East, but even that is just a way of changing our sense of reality. They had something that was thrown away before we came along, and we need to dig it back up. Something in that is durable and still alive, while the mere trappings have rotted away into the dust. Wood and cloth dissolve, but gold never corrodes. Let’s rediscover the rich heritage and vast riches of what our barbaric forefathers bulldozed down without a clue to what was truly valuable.

Our world isn’t particularly evil, just empty. It’s essence has been up to now a persistent blind preference for emptiness; that’s the evil part. Most people don’t insist on emptiness, but simply don’t know it’s empty. Our world imagines that there is nothing beyond what man can measure and has built a vast container for measuring, but there is nothing to measure. Fill the container; burst the old wineskins with the ferment of new wine. Show how it is wholly unsuitable for truly living. We aren’t offering anything that hasn’t been available all along, but people have refused to see it, never mind understand its value.

Do you see how I can exhaust all the metaphors? Folks, we have been denied our divine heritage in Christ. Reclaim the divine justice that Our Savior taught.