(Serializing here the draft of my book, Biblical Law: Divine Justice.)
7. Hostile World
We live in a world that is hostile to divine justice. We are not surprised that Paul warns the Roman Christians of his day that all Creation cries out for relief (Romans 8:18-25). Most of humanity has no heart, so they are unable to hear it.
Your first step is to awaken your heart as a sensory organ. There are no nifty exercises or training anyone can put into clinical terms. You simply have to be aware that it is possible and pray for God to reveal it. The biggest threat is substituting emotion in place of it or somehow imagining that random crazy ideas come from your heart. That’s not how the Spirit works. While it is likely emotions will be stirred at least part of the time, it has to work when there is no emotion at all. It also contains no rational content, but is expressed always as a drive without words. It comes upon your soul as an imperative that demands you work out in your mind how to obey it.
A primary symptom that it is working is that you’ll hear that anguished cry of Creation for divine justice. It won’t be in your ears, but you’ll feel a pull on your heart. It doesn’t work the same for everyone, but if elements in our natural world do not seem vividly alive and rejoicing in the love of the Father, it’s probably not working. This is far more than merely enjoying the wonder and beauty of nature. Rather, you sense a drawing and kinship, a burden of responsibility, as if nature were very much alive and calling your name. Be aware that it works best with native natural flora and fauna, not something exotic or highly domesticated. There can easily be far more to it than that, but this is rather the minimum.
What is really exciting about this is when you encounter other people who share this gift. On the one hand, this is how the Lord made us all, and it is potentially available to every human alive on the planet. On the other hand, Western Civilization has been implacably hostile to this faculty from the beginning. Hostile to the notion of a sensory heart is hostile to God and to divine justice.
Nor should we expect to recover every aspect of divine justice. It will likely be a major struggle to train your own children to live this way against a Western society with so many diversions. ANE feudalism is the divine model, but we were warned it would be increasingly difficult to call people into God’s divine justice. Rather, this is chiefly for our own awareness. Instead, we should hope that we can nudge things here and there, incrementally instituting His moral character where possible. Whenever the context allows you some freedom, do not follow the path of our deeply fallen age. Always choose divine truth as the path of life itself, regardless how inexplicable it may be to others.
Then again, it never hurts to explain when possible. You’ll have to find your own way of telling the truth in any given context, though it begins with simply living by the wisdom of your own heart. The New Testament emphasizes the readiness to answer the inevitable questions. However, that doesn’t mean sometimes you really can’t tell them anything useful. Sometimes you simply have to allow them to label you as crazy or alien because your head is most assuredly in an alternate universe. If your calling is to be somewhat prophetic about it, then you’ll have to spend a lot of time learning how God wants you to present His truth. For most of us, it’s a major victory just recognizing that truth.
And it’s not as if your heart needs no training. Scripture often uses the language of searching your own heart before God, a figure of speech for striving to reshape your commitments to match every new discovery you make along the way. Unlike Jesus, we are not born fully morally developed. Even our hearts are cluttered with misunderstanding and false values. When you are striving for God’s favor, there is no shame in making adjustments every day. Indeed, we should find it disturbing if so much as two weeks pass without being somewhat a different person than before. A critical element in bringing Him glory is that we change, and how we go about it. We are alive and growing morally.
Catch the vision: You represent a tiny minority of humanity that has awakened all the faculties God granted us at Creation. We are natively in tune with reality itself. There are flaws in our discernment, but God is more concerned with the fundamental desire to please Him than with any success. As noted in Romans 13, it is that sacrificial love and communion with our world that fulfills the Laws of God. All Creation longs for us to grow and become stronger in our obedience and seeking His glory.
