Ditching the Mainstream Mythology

Starting point: It is impossible for us to know how God regards other people. We can know our own standing with Him, but only if we consciously shift our awareness to the heart. By that same means, we can also know how God wants us to regard other people. Thus, our regard will not reflect any assumptions about their eternal condition, but how they relate to us in any given context.

In that frame of reference, we then say that there are three kinds of people in God’s Kingdom: There are three kinds of people as far as we are concerned. Let’s enumerate them.

1. We have covenant family members. There are people who, with or without formal declaration, give evidence of being committed to divine justice as best we know it. We don’t pretend to be arbiters of divine justice for everyone else, only those whom God places within the feudal domain He grants us. The barriers are high and the investments are substantial, so this is not something that comes and goes easily. We are reluctant to let anyone go into ostracism, so we give them more room to make mistakes and assume the Lord will bring them through to repentance and recovery. We hope the same for ourselves.

2. There are servants who participate meaningfully, but are not fully vested in long term outcomes. They are allies with overlapping interests. They offer a conditional allegiance, which may or may not stand life long. They are helpful and warrant some consideration in what we do in serving the Lord. These are the Good Samaritans in our lives. It is a moral flaw to think in binary terms of “our gang” versus “our enemies.”

3. There are slaves, people we are forced to deal with but whose usefulness is highly variable in our Kingdom service. They don’t care if they serve our Lord’s glory, and may not hesitate to betray any trust we grant them. Conditions may force us to be vulnerable to them in some degree, but we can’t really trust them. They are the machinery of life, but with a measure of free will to cooperate or not. This includes our enemies, in that we can’t ignore them.

Everyone and everything else in our world is scenery, background.

It is the folly of Western evangelical mythology to imagine that there is something wrong with such a frame of reference. We have all been gravely counseled in Western churches to consider every human a possible convert to the Kingdom, and that we are burdened with seeking to convert all of them. This is not a biblical assumption, but a Western one, a false reading of the Great Commission. For the mainstream church leadership, it’s all about selling the product and winning customers to their brand. More is better; this defines holiness for mainstream church leaders. They ignore the New Testament warning that there are some out there who will never join us, and should not be dragged into it.

Jesus Himself warned that there are folks out there who should rightly be regarded as pigs unfit for our pearls of divine truth. We should be able to recognize them as such and avoid provoking them. We should handle people according to their willingness to engage the covenant under which we serve, for as long as they choose to do so. It’s not a question of where they stand with God, but the part they play in our mission. Our mission is to keep our own doors open to others, and to recognize how far inside people will come; nothing we do can affect God’s doors.

We are finite. None of us have been granted the resources to help the whole world. It is unavoidable that some folks will remain in the background for us. We cannot compel anyone to come closer than they feel led by the Spirit. It is an audacious lie that God intends to use us to save everyone and make them family. That’s the lie of globalism; the Tower of Babel teaches us that we are meant to be small tribes.

Evangelism isn’t a special project; it’s a necessary part of obedience to Biblical Law. The primary method of evangelism is always simply living to shine God’s glory in every way. The Lord will draw those whom He desires us to encounter. We can formulate our response, but we cannot pretend to know how things will turn out. The admonition to sell your religion arises from a very perverted understanding of the Bible. Simply be as clear as you know how to those you encounter.