Our Crazy Ancient New Religion 1

Have you ever wondered why the Law of Moses is loaded with what seems mere sanitation measures?

Anyone with some knowledge of modern health sciences tends to notice how much of what Moses called “divine justice” is just common sense healthy choices for folks in that time and place. Does it make divine justice a little less divine? Only if your approach to religion lacks the heart-mind. To a Western rationalist, it is utterly necessary to understand all things from human reason. Once a rational answer is found, the discussion is ended: “We know what this is.”

No, you don’t.

Holiness as defined by that ancient religion was not in the ritual. It was a heart-led religion and culture, not a rational and materialistic culture. The ritual was reaching for a holiness totally outside reason. If all you had was ritual obedience, you could get by. There would be things that you wouldn’t like, things that didn’t make sense, but you would at least not get into trouble with your community. For a lot of folks, that was reason enough, because most people would hardly survive outside of their community.

But that would not carry the whole nation. Someone in leadership had to understand with their hearts, not just their heads, that the rituals had a far deeper reason. It was more than simple tradition as most folks today think of it. It was holiness in the sense of wholeness, of being consistent with reality. It was seeing beyond mere function to the moral heart of the matter.

Ritual and tradition are not strong enough. Health science is not strong enough, either. It has to be something that pulls at you from another realm, something that empowers you to walk, not so much in slavish obedience, but in the joy of finding your real self.

It’s true that some of the rituals of Moses are incomprehensible to us today. Part of the problem is centuries of intellectual drift so that we have virtually no one translating today who grasps the heart-led analysis, so we get garbled English renderings. I’m not superior to them, so I set aside those things if I can’t come up with a guess that brings me a sense of peace. But for the most part, the Law of Moses is contextual morality, and genuine holiness with God looks a lot like just plain good health. But making that connection straight across from human reason to human results misses the whole point.

We have to climb up into the moral sphere before we can understand what’s going on here.

Creation bears the stamp of God’s character. That should be obvious to anyone who can swallow the idea of God as Creator. It’s His design and consistent with His Person and character. But it’s alive, not inert — He said that. Thus, it responds to His touch in a very personal and living manner. It responds to the only signature it knows: His divine character. So when some other source manifests His character, how can Creation not respond to that, as well? God says the key to knowing and recognizing Him is a matter of moral character. Moral character is visible only from the heart-mind. The intellect cannot read such things; it knows only the mechanics of things.

Your fleshly body is a part of Creation. If you harmonize with His moral character in regards to your body, you will be as healthy as you can be on this earth. It’s the same as when you act in Creation aside from your fleshly body. Doing what’s right for Creation is right for your body, and vice versa. Nail this down: holiness and health are linked. Not where our intellect can see the link, but the heart alone can see it. The link apparent to our intellect is missing a lot of depth.

Our heart seeks to conform to the Creator’s love. This will, of necessity, conflict with the advice you get from health professionals at times, just as conforming to the other parts of Moses’ Law conflict with human evaluations of justice. They cannot see the moral fabric of Creation, and cannot justify in their reasoning what God requires. Creation is dead and inert to human reason.

Much of what we do in obedience to our Creator’s loving guidance turns out to be healthy for our bodies, but that’s not really the point for us.