Western Idolatries 03

God does not dwell in houses made by human hands. He is a spirit being whose existence is rooted in a different dimension. His is the original, the true “reality” and ours is the fallen illusion. You can touch His heart, but you cannot in any way make a difference in His existence.

This life we have now is not what He intended for us. Mortality is not our nature, but our situation. It’s the fallback plan, the state in which we find ourselves because He couldn’t let us stay in the Garden of Eden. Our conscience drives us to hide from Him. We can’t see Him face to face in our flesh. The path to recovery is in revelation.

We are accountable to God for what Scripture says. I’m not going to bind you to my sense of what is and isn’t canonical. I confess that we can’t really know for certain how we arrived at the canon of Scripture, but we can be sure He will not take it lightly if you don’t have some sense of conscience about what the Bible says. If you get too far from my convictions, I don’t have to take seriously your claims of faith. My convictions say that your convictions will not contradict the written record of divine revelation, though we are likely to come up with varying understandings of what it demands of us. Anything we might have in common starts with some diligent effort to understand what is revealed in the Book, and the tradition of what we can know about divine revelation begins with the Covenant of Moses.

The rituals of that covenant religion were not for Him; they were for His people. As a part of the legacy of Biblical Law, the prescribed rituals and requirements were designed to speak to our souls, to awaken something eternal in us. It calls to us so that we seek Him. Rituals and observances don’t change the situation; they can change our hearts if we are seeking Him.

In the Covenant of Moses, baptism was a ritual that was repeated often. It was part of that awareness of our fallen nature. If you intended to come to the Tabernacle or Temple to meet with God, you would want to ensure you observed the protocols of reverence. As a part of that, you would want to stop and bathe as you got near the place to demonstrate to God your sincere desire for a clear conscience. That’s why there were so many baptismal pools around the Temple Mount. You were expected to avail yourself of these public accommodations. It was never meant to be a one-time ritual.

Being aware of this should help to provide the context by which we move away from the idea of ritual as somehow magical. If the rituals could do us any good, if the sacrifices in the Temple actually changed anything, then there would be no reason to keep coming back. You could meet God once in the Temple and never return. But the Lord Himself demanded that His people keep coming back, because we live in a temporal existence in which our flesh keeps pulling us away from the Spirit. Adam won’t stay nailed to the Cross, so we have to repeat the rituals to remind him he is fallen.

The importance of baptism to the Ethiopian Eunuch was that he was finally welcome in God’s Presence. Under Ritual Law he was not allowed in the Temple, and baptism was pointless. But in Christ, being a eunuch was no longer a hindrance to worshiping the Lord. Something had changed with the death and resurrection of the Anointed One. The Temple Veil was torn open. There was no longer a constant Temple ritual of sacrifice. Instead, there was the constant reminder of self-sacrifice. If the Ethiopian was going into God’s Presence finally, why did he continue on his way back home to Ethiopia? Because what Philip taught him from the Book of Isaiah was that there was a final point to the rituals, and it was the Anointed One. God’s divine Presence was no longer restricted to one geographical location. The Temple was just a facility sitting on real estate, not the House of God. He lived in hearts; people are His New Temple. So, now the rituals were done, but the meaning of the rituals remained eternal.

It is symbolism; it is mystery and mysticism. You are required to internalize the rituals. Adam would love nothing more than to restore all the fleshly ritual requirements, to restore the control to fleshly existence, because it permits him to ignore their eternal meaning. He can jump through the hoops and push God back into the closet when the rituals are done. Well, that veil of covering has been ripped away by the Cross. You can no longer hide in the ritual observance and national laws. There is no longer any earthly tribal identity by which you can safely ignore the Spirit Realm and boast in your DNA. Your citizenship in the Kingdom is not an earthly artifact, but a matter of spiritual reality.

The Kingdom of God exists only in hearts. It is not an earthly political domain. There is no valid meaning to the term “Christendom.” That word itself perverts what Christ came to do. Even if there were such a thing that God honored, not a single earthly political entity meets the requirements. There is no special nation on this earth protected and granted some unique destiny under God’s hand. Not a single political entity exists under a valid Law Covenant, with a tribal identity and a proper God-ordained feudal order. The priesthood is not inherited in the flesh, nor in authorizing rituals, but in a heart that seeks the Lord.

Naturally, there is no end of people using mystical statements in Scripture as an excuse to make law. It’s bad law because it abuses the words to mean something God didn’t actually require of His people. For example, we see “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” bandied about as a call to embrace one or another particular expression of faith as somehow the only thing God will bless. Let’s re-translate Ephesians 4:5, which looks like this in Greek:

εἷς κύριος, μία πίστις, ἓν βάπτισμα

The Letter to the Ephesians, so near as anyone can tell, was aimed at all the little satellite churches that had sprouted around the community that was born from Paul’s visit to Ephesus. It was a cosmopolitan place, with people bringing to one location a vast wealth of human traditions. The fourth chapter was an appeal for unity in the Spirit, even though it was not possible to have unity in the flesh. Given the broader context of their lives in that region and the Hebrew mystical legacy of the existing Scriptures at that time, we could translate those words like this:

We have one feudal Lord, we share one common commitment of loyalty to Him, and His cleansing is the one thing that brings us all into His Presence.

What holds us together as a kingdom is our hearts, not an order and hierarchy of mere humans. There’s nothing wrong with a hierarchy of people; that was implied by the existence of a law covenant. The churches were meant to be little feudal households, but the authority was spiritual, not fleshly. You could decided at any time that your heart no longer bound you to the church family and you would go seek another that was more consistent with the fresh demands from God in your life. The temporal reality was meant to be temporary and provisional, subject to revision on some level from day to day. Your church family doesn’t own you for life. You can go and start a new faith household, or join one that accommodates your mission. But there was nothing at all sacred about this or that particular expression of faith in organized religious activity.

The Good Samaritan would never have wanted to become a citizen of the Judean nation, nor worship in Herod’s Temple and live among the Jewish people. They were sworn enemies. But God counted that Samaritan as part of the Kingdom of Heaven, and required that him to treat the distressed Jewish man as his brother in that other spiritual sense. God wasn’t the property of the Jewish people. The Samaritan recognized that requirement of faith and obeyed. He was part of that “one Lord, one faith, one cleansing.”

We can symbolize the whole point here by focusing on that word “baptism.” By never translating that word from Greek, but anglicizing it as a special word with sacred meaning, we have lost what it should have meant for the Hebrew people. It was a ritual cleansing; that’s what baptizo means in Greek and that’s what it was in the Old Testament. It was used by John the Baptist as a symbol of the call to repentance. He warned that without a genuine sense of calling in the heart, it was noting more than getting wet. Jesus didn’t need to repent, but He needed to testify that John had the right message.

He also needed to debase Himself and wash the feet of His disciples at the Last Seder. It was another cleansing ritual. He also needed to point out that it was the Last Seder. He seized upon bits and pieces of Ritual Law and gave them a new meaning. He told the Woman at the Well that once He was risen, temples and rituals wouldn’t matter that much. What would matter was a sincerity of heart, a genuine prostration of the soul before the eternal feudal Master of Creation.

Don’t let mere men decide for you what God requires. If God drives you to fellowship with this person or that group, do so. But realize that there is nothing sacred in the context itself, only in the shared commitment to obey the convictions of the heart. A lot of churches aren’t actually covenant communities of faith. A lot of governments claim a form of deification. There is no real difference; an organizations of humans is still just a human institution. No church and no nation can claim your eternal allegiance. That’s reserved for the Lord alone.