If you can understand the Ancient Near Eastern intellectual context of the Bible, then you easily realize that the Scripture aims to present God’s moral character. That it may also reveal a little about history and other types of data that humans tend to consider far more important is accidental. The Bible is not about facts and history. It is about the character of God, in the packaging God chose to reveal Himself.
A critical element in this revelation is the packaging. We are obliged to approach Him on His terms. He demands that we take the time to shed our intellectual and cultural biases. Not so we can pretend we are objective about this, but He demands that we embrace the cultural and intellectual background He designed for the purpose. Not every detail of that cultural and historical packaging, but we are commanded to make some effort to discern what matters. I assure you most humans today are not taking this challenge seriously. There is a pernicious tendency to assume our current cultural packaging is good, right, essential. We suffer a complete lack of comprehension that ours is unfit for understanding God’s moral character. The cultural context in which we live militantly denies such a possibility, so we end up with people insisting God has to meet them on their terms.
Sometimes we have to stop and point this out. Not just in my writing, but in my meat-space conversations, one of my favorite shock lines to get things out in the open is something like this: No on on this earth has any business ruling your life unless they are first related to you by blood or marriage. This is little more than a restatement of God’s moral laws. Most people can’t even imagine a world like that, and keep reading such a social and political context out of Scripture by reading their own secular Nation-State context back into it. Folks, the Treaty of Westphalia did not come from the Bible. That historical document represents the fundamental end of allowing people to obey God on this point. The treaty was not about self-determination of people, but asserted as orthodoxy the right of various plutocrat authorities to ignore tribal family government outside of their own ruling families.
In effect, all persons residing within the borders of some arbitrary territory became slaves of the ruling clique. The pretense was some idealized objective rule of law, but laws have to be enforced by people, and the people who have the power are the ones who decide what the law means and how it should be enforced. The residents were no long members of a family, but were subject to the interfering whims of some wholly unrelated and hostile bunch of folks who could not and would not suffer any accountability to God on the matter. They simply cut through all the inconveniences God designed to frustrate oppression. This is part of what the Tower of Babel was all about; God broke up centralized authority by making it nearly impossible for that context. It was a signal, which signal mankind has consistently rejected ever since. (We are headed for another round of God teaching the lesson, another experience of “Babylon is fallen!”)
You’ll notice how everything you read universally excoriates as wholly and utterly immoral the natural human instinct to cling to our mutually unintelligible languages and customs. Yet such “parochialism” is precisely what God commanded of the human race. Try telling that one in your next church gathering.
This is the background for understanding what God says is good, right and just in this fallen world. Not that we become political activists to demand our “right” to live in tribal communities, but that we develop so much of that as the context allows by creating a virtual clan in forming our churches. A church is fundamentally a household bound by covenant, by a shared spiritual DNA in Christ’s blood. In the Bible, covenant commitments took precedence over literal blood ties, though ideally they would coincide. On this earth we are bound first and foremost to our covenant with Christ, then with those who share that commitment. Yes, we vary our cooperation based on a thousand human factors, because the issue is not control in the first place, but communion and seeking God’s calling. We fully expect our world to be hostile. Worse, we also have a vast ocean of those who somehow still claim Christ while rejecting just about everything He taught.
It’s complex. Now let me recommend, if you have time for a relatively long read, a speech by Paul Craig Roberts. You would have to know this man does not share much of what I wrote above. Still, he offers some useful insights from within his own context. Being a fallen human, same as the rest of us, he carries a load of bias for which he will answer to God in due time. We recognize the very fact of bias itself and go into reading anything like this with a measure of cynical distrust. I suppose he would understand that on some level himself, but this is what caught my attention from the article:
Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neoconservative, penned the Wolfowitz Doctrine… Notice that Washington’s “first objective” is not peace, not prosperity, not human rights, not democracy, not justice. Washington’s “first objective” is world hegemony….
Washington’s position is not negotiable. Washington has no interest in compromising with Russia or China. Washington has no interest in any facts. Washington’s deal is this: “You can be part of our world order as our vassals, but not otherwise.”
Perhaps the statement is not so shocking in itself but it’s how Roberts brings us to that bottom line, offering documentation that bluntly states this as the truth. So you can ignore all the sweet sounding junk that newsreaders and loyal journalists tell you about US national goals in this world. It’s bullshit. Roberts goes on to show how the bankers find this policy consistent with their own dreams of global domination.
He also tries to whip on liberals and slings the neocon label around, but don’t be fooled. A lot of other labels would fit just as well. The plutocrats at the top are people and they are people who want money and power, and the issue is not their identity but their identifiable plans and goals. Calling this or that person a neocon is not a matter of some personal devotion to the philosophy, but the net result of their actions. Put them under pressure and few of them would cling to anything except their own personal interests.
This is, of course, the fundamental lie behind claims of objective reasoning as the driving force. Objective Truth is the false god of the Western world, a world that vehemently denies there is anything beyond this realm of existence. Because our loyalty is outside the human realm, we will find ourselves accused of the same moral weakness and lack of commitment to principle because most of the world presumes that morality is a matter of objective truth. As is frequently stated here, that is the single biggest lie that binds humanity today.
Morality is the Person of God Himself, dynamic and personal in nature.
