Chapter 8 — More on Legalism
It seems odd that mainstream Christianity is so quick to nitpick over some passages of Scripture — what Christ called “sifting out gnats” from flour — and swallowing the camel on other passages (Matthew 23:24).
In 1 Corinthians 10:14-22, Paul warns against idolatry. He’s writing to Corinthians who were deeply immersed in a depraved idolatry that rivaled the ancient Canaanites. It’s hard to recapture the distaste, and leering smirk, that people in Paul’s day associated with the label “Corinthian.” It was an epithet slung at folks who might have never seen the city itself, but acted with complete insensitivity to any moral standard of any kind.
Most people see a connection between Paul’s admonition and the comment in Deuteronomy 32:17, along with a slew of other cross references. And how do they square this with Joseph and Daniel? Granted, Joseph was prior to the Moses, but if it means anything at all, then the moral principle remains the same. Abraham was under a covenant that excluded worshiping any of the other gods he had known in Mesopotamia. As best we can understand, Abraham knew a lot of them because he belonged to the scholarly pagan priest guild of Ancient Sumeria.
Try to understand this: Study and awareness of pagan mythology and other deities is not the same thing as idolatry. There won’t be demons hiding in the print, waiting to jump out and stake a claim on your soul just because you read the sacred texts of some non-Christian religion. Recognizing how certain pagan myths do promote some elements of God’s moral character is not blasphemy. All truth is God’s truth — your heart transmits a note of recognition to the mind because the heart discerns moral truth. We should rather be surprised when elements of God’s revelation aren’t found in pagan mythology.
It is the more degraded forms of pagan religion where revelation is missing. How hard is to imagine that “pagan” is not uniformly evil? How hard is it realize that the Norse and Anglo-Saxon pagan myths are more degrading and inimical to Christian revelation than an awful lot of other pagan backgrounds? I wonder why mainstream Christians see Jehovah in their minds portrayed as the grouchy old Norse deity instead of the wisecracking and pleasant Eastern nomad shiekh that God chose as His image. And yet we defend to the death our perverted brand of Anglo-Saxon “morality” by calling it “Christian” while rejecting a whole range of pagan stuff that is actually much closer to the Bible.
Do we forget so easily that Balaam (Numbers 22-24) accurately understood the proper rituals for getting God’s attention under the same context as Abraham? Balaam was a pagan scholar of religions, much like Abraham, a common occupation in Ancient Mesopotamia. Such scholarship was the primary path to government service in the several empires that occupied that land. It was mandatory for Daniel and his Hebrew buddies. And has anybody noticed in the narrative that Balaam seems unsurprised that his mount would communicate with him a divine moral truth? God didn’t hesitate to answer Balaam’s requests for revelation under the terms that applied to him.
This is the same God who didn’t hesitate to address a pagan Abraham and several other characters in Scripture who weren’t under the Covenant of Moses. Just because the Old Testament carefully focuses on a single thread of narrative does not justify excluding any of the ways God spoke to the rest of the human race. Did we forget about Jethro or Melchizedek, both recognized by God’s men as also being spiritual and moral peers?
Too many mainstream Christians are quick on the trigger to condemn anything different than what they think God requires for them personally. It’s as if they imagine God gave them alone some grand dispensation of truth on the Mountain of God with Moses. Even Moses understood that the Covenant was with Israel only, not binding on the rest of the world. And how easy it is to forget that Moses was highly influenced by his own Egyptian pagan education, and his father-in-law’s background in Mesopotamian (Abrahamic) religion. Moses was heart-led and recognized God’s truth within each of those sources, and his broader experienced resulted in a religion that was significantly different from that of Abraham.
This narrow legalistic reading of the Bible from a highly compromised frame of reference, like the Pharisees, serves only to keep us away from the richness of God’s full blessings. I note with great sadness how many Western Christians make the Pharisaical mistake of conflating their mental conception of God with God Himself, and worship their own intellect instead. This takes us right back to the Fall, placing human reason on the throne. This is precisely the problem we are addressing in this book.
