Fresh Winds

Working on this Project Foul Winds, it helps if we first establish a norm. What’s the good stuff we could have from God? What is the difference between fresh and foul?

Let’s outline, because the details are already in my books. Jesus is the final revelation of God’s moral character. He was the Living Law of God in the sense that a sovereign’s law was his way of doing things, an expression of his character. Jesus was born under the Law of Moses; He lived and taught that Law as it was meant to be. All His miracles were an expression of the shalom blessings God had promised under the Law. Jesus worked to restore the divine justice of that Covenant.

He did that because the nation had abandoned it. Read that sentence again. The Law did not fail Israel; Israel failed the Law. Jesus came to call them back to the Law as it was meant to be. Whatever He said the Law meant is what God meant in the Law. He fulfilled the Law’s purpose and its conditions. The Covenant ended with His death on the Cross. He didn’t end the Law in the sense that it was no longer applicable to life, in the sense that the blessings of shalom would no longer be offered to anyone. The Covenant was conditional between two parties and one of those parties violated it. He ended it by declaring it null and void for the nation that had refused to obey it.

Indeed, they had refused to understand it aright. It’s a matter of established historical record that sometime between the capitulation of the rump nation of Israel to Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the birth of Jesus, that the Jewish scholars had Hellenized and completely buried their Hebraic intellectual background. They traded their mystical heritage for Greek-styled rational analysis. At least some of the things Jesus said in His public disputes with the Jewish leadership was to call them back to their ancient Hebrew mystical heritage. Without that, they could not understand the Law properly, which meant that they could not understand their God. Instead, they reasoned to a false law and constructed a false image of God. They worshiped their own reason and human wisdom, a form of idolatry worse than any that had seduced the nation up to that time.

While the ministry of Jesus did include a great deal of revelation about the final eternal end of human souls, what most Christians today fail to understand is that Jesus also resurrected the purpose of the Law as the revelation of His Father’s character in His own character. Paul flatly said that human decisions could not possibly change their eternal destiny. The linkage is not of direct consequence, as if we could steer the hand of God, but such a destiny does correlate to embracing and walking in the Covenant of Christ in this world. Paul also wrote that it was a Christian obligation to read the Old Testament, and to understand it from that ancient Hebrew mystical perspective that Jesus restored. Paul flatly said that this would make us what Israel should have been, that in Christ we would be the New Israel.

So the Law remains valid in terms of what it tells us of God’s character. And if you can understand Jesus’ teaching well enough to implement that Law’s purpose in your life, you can recover all the blessings of shalom that Old Israel threw away. Let me assure you that if any nation, or any political entity at all for that matter, were to embrace the Law as Jesus taught it, we should line up to immigrate there and be a part of that. In fact, if they would just make a clean and firm commitment to the Covenant of Noah, we should still support them with all we can give. Short of that, not a single political entity in this world is morally valid, in that sense. We have been taught to try to get along with them, but not take any of their various moral claims seriously. They have no moral claims on so much as a single speck of sand blowing in the wind so long as they come up short of a public and visible commitment to the God’s Laws.

If Modern Israel were to take seriously the Law of Moses as Jesus taught it, we should ask permission to convert and become a citizen. So far as I can determine, there is not so much as a single group there that meets that requirement. I have no problem with biblical Israel going back and reclaiming their ancient homeland, but not this Israel. This Israel denies the Covenant; the nation is officially secular. The religious citizens are all over the map of Judaism, but none of them has embraced the Covenant of Moses. You want proof? I’ve got massive volumes of excruciating detail in how they have moved even farther from God’s Word than they were in Jesus’ time. Supporting Modern Israel as she is now is blasphemy; it’s poking God in the eye and spitting on His Son’s blood.

You and I are left with only one choice right now: We must learn how to claim so much of shalom as conditions permit as individuals and households. Through us, God will restore His divine justice by the same power as He gave Jesus, but it will be somewhat limited by the context in which He places each of us. All that we can hope for in this life under His divine justice is wrapped up in reflecting His glory by walking in His character in His Creation. Insofar as we must contend with Satan, the whole issue is in reclaiming that heritage in this life. Satan can do nothing about our eternal destiny, but he can sure as Hell steal the glory of God from our hands if we let him.

Satan’s breath is the Foul Winds we have to recognize.