God Responds

I’ve concluded that our ISP has started blocking our incoming traffic, so the FTP server is gone for now.

There was a time when I was taught that, insofar as God knew the future, it had to be envisioned as something set in stone at Creation. That is, every detail of future events in our fallen realm was planned out down to the last movement of subatomic particles. It was all locked in; God knew the future because He made the future and was so utterly perfect and wise about it that the mere thought of revising it was blasphemous.

I understood it, but my heart said it was a lie. I just didn’t have the basis for coming up with an argument against that teaching. All the theological alternatives were equally bad. Having made the choice to make my heart the executive in my life, my mind now grasps the nature of things differently.

God is living and active in our affairs. He relates to us personally, but primarily through our hearts. If we begin to live by our convictions, our brain finds out that the heart is alive and superior, because it breathes the wisdom of God as a manifestation of His moral character. Moreover, Creation itself is alive, not some inanimate lump of stuff that can be preprogrammed. His promises say that if we come closer to His truth, He will bless us with things we can’t otherwise have.

That signals a living variability. God’s moral character doesn’t change, but His Creation and His hand on Creation does vary according to how well we conform ourselves to the image of His Son.

I wasn’t mistaken when my spirit prophetically warned that the world was about to enter some measure of apocalyptic disaster time a few years back. That was where it was headed. Something has changed God’s plans for us, particularly for us who seek a heart-led existence. We now stand knowingly in the shadow of His grace and mercy, so He has decided to moderate His plans. He can receive from Creation the same glory — even greater glory — by coming up with some other sequence of events. History is fungible in the same sense that all of reality is fungible. So long as His glory shines, the details can be adjusted.

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t the kind of arrogance that we have somehow displaced Ancient Israel and now sit in their favored spot. We are not a replacement for them. We have not inherited the grand experiment of creating a special sacred political entity on this earth. But we have inherited the mission God gave to all of humanity way back after the Fall. We see the words of the Curse in Genesis 3, but there was that business of the Flaming Sword. Let that sword have it’s work in you and Eden is open once again. You have to stop eating from the Tree of Human Intellect. We are still under the Covenant of Noah, as was always the case, but the Covenant of Moses ended at the Cross. Replacement Theology is bogus because there’s nothing to replace.

So whatever it was I was doing with the FTP server and all that other stuff is no longer needed. I’ve been banging my head against the wall trying to keep that previous plan working while everything fell apart. I didn’t understand until a string of realizations finally awakened the awareness that there’s been a change in plans. The same hardware and technology will be used some other way. I haven’t seen it yet because my mind is just now ready to let the old plans go.

I’m not trying to cover any embarrassment for maybe having stupid plans, as if I didn’t really understand God’s will. Those were good, solid, heart-led plans for the way things were headed then. Things aren’t headed that way now, so I have to be nimble and ready to drop what I was doing and start working on what comes next. I’m willing to bet some of you have sensed something similar. The basic mission is the same and our teaching won’t change. The strategy is the same, but we will have to work on new tactics.

Pray with me that I can discern my part; let’s pray together that we are ready to respond to the call.