The Tribe of Heaven

An essential element in Satan’s mandate from God is to build sustainable deceptions.

Once again: The mainstream Western view of Satan is all wrong. There are certain details it gets right, but the underlying assumptions are false. We can blame Satan himself for that. God established the Hebrew worldview as the best way to understand Him and His Creation. That viewpoint is radically different from the mainstream Western outlook. We are obliged to steep ourselves in that ancient Hebrew orientation in order to understand revelation, and in turn to understand reality itself, because the Western approach is flatly wrong on most things.

So the Bible depicts Satan as God’s left-hand man, His Punisher. Satan is there to catch the folks who reject God’s revelation of Himself and His ways. His job is to imprison the renegades and profit from their struggles, to ensure they receive very little benefit from their rebellion. God is so generous and kind that He pours out shalom in endless supply, so the Devil has to capture a lot of it to ensure sinners don’t receive theirs unjustly. The means to capture includes keeping sinners busy chasing things that could never be. It matters little what they are chasing, as long as it is false.

We are designed to obey God. We have to do things His way, operating from the heart instead of human intellect. All it takes is humble penitence at the revelation of God to break free from Satan’s prison. His revelation is a living Person, His Son Jesus. This is contrary to the nature of human intellect, seeking all kinds of ways to control things. It’s a distraction from our true purpose in living. We exist to bring glory to God; nothing else matters. So with the Fall, we were all placed in Satan’s prison, born there. We have to struggle to the light to get out. This is not hidden, but it does require some help, help that God has given freely to all.

The primary structure of Satan’s prison is civilization. I want you to notice that the Hebrew people were never an independent civilization, especially in their own minds. They were a covenant nation; that was their whole identity. At their peak of national strength, they were simply an independent collect of tribes taking advantage of what was available to fulfill their mission. Their mission was to manifest the glory of God and His revelation. That meant their greatest power came from rejecting most of the trappings of civilization. Cities were a convenience, a virtual necessity for human existence in a fallen world, but it was never a core function of their existence. The fallback position was always, “To your tents, O Israel!” Let the other nations waste their efforts in building great civilizations, because the rise and fall cycle was the best they could do without revelation.

Western Civilization is not going to crash and burn, per se, but will taper off into insignificance. As with it’s own birth, drawn from the ruins of Greco-Roman Civilization and the Germanic Tribes, so the West will simply become an element in the next civilization, mixed in with something else. None of it comes from God; it’s all a vanity of vanities, chasing after the wind and striving for what could never be. The West will ever remain a monument to Satan’s power to deceive on a grand scale, and for a very long time.

There’s nothing wrong with civility. According to the myths, civility is the foundation of civilization. But it is a myth; it’s just a word created to tie circumspect behavior to false goals. Most people within Western Civilization struggle with civility because circumspect behavior is not native to the fallen condition. Civility requires seeing beyond the goals of civilization, in part because it requires seeing beyond the self.

The only way to escape the mass deception is by making yourself part of the Tribe of Heaven.