Look at the logic of it. Think about what’s bundled into the reasoning people offer; seek to understand the a priori assumptions they refuse to discuss or reconsider. Keep asking “why” until you get to the basic assumptions. God will help you do this.
If we start from the assumption that this world is fallen, and that nothing we can build is really worth a lot, it leads to a different lifestyle. The only difference civilization makes is that it increases material comfort for some. It is not an unalloyed good. Scripture warns about the pursuit of such things, that they will pull you off track. It shows up in all kinds of places.
Why did Israel demand of the prophet Samuel that he bug God about giving them a king? Was God somehow unhappy with the unruly mob that Israel had become? Not at all. Men were unhappy with the story of Judges, but God wasn’t worried about the same things at all. God was quite happy to let things run along their course with only Him as their ruler. If it could work at all, it had to work without centralizing controls. Israel demanded a king out of envy of other nations. They envied all the human “benefits” and cared not a whit that it would enslave them.
The world is filled with people who can’t be bothered doing the work of seeking God and facing the natural chaos of the Fall. They are looking for shortcuts, ways to bind the process so that the results will be limited to a narrow range of what they can tolerate. They’d rather forfeit their freedom to hear the Lord’s calling and finding peace with Him in their hearts, in exchange for a managed peace that guarantees restricting everyone to the same vanilla flavor of life.
This is why I keep raising the specter of centralization as inherently evil.
Society as a whole finds it threatening to their vanilla order if I choose to live in poverty. It’s regarded as a problem that I don’t want all the stuff they think everyone should want. I’m not normal; it’s mental illness to be comfortable with far less. They make laws to compel me to live in structures built using expensive materials and methods, and then compel me to submit to their system of finding me an economically useful job. I am required to sacrifice my whole life in labor at some kind of job that is specifically designed to make me numb to the wind of the Holy Spirit. It has been ruled in courts across the USA that my rejection of the materialistic middle class lifestyle if flatly illegal. The government must be able to squeeze me for the taxes I could make for them if I was as greedy as everyone else.
It’s not their intent to rob me of the time and energy I need to contemplate in my heart the things God demands of me. They simply deny that it could be important.
Granted, that worldly system is crumbling. That’s because God has gotten tired of seeing His children chained and pulled away from Him. Once again a centralized and “civilized” system will be destroyed and humans will be forced to start from scratch. It’s a cycle that must wear on His nerves, because they never listen. The next civilization will be even worse. Still, as with the Tower of Babel, He’s going to insure that no system raised up by men to close Him off will ever stand long.
God wanted Israel to stay in their tents, nomadic in their own land, utterly dependent on Him alone. He wasn’t too concerned about how Israel would tend to fracture. He was content for however many trusted in Him to stick to the mission of simply being the people of God.
In His Son He has shifted the whole business of the Kingdom onto a higher plane. There is no Kingdom of God rooted on this earth. It’s a kingdom of hearts. And it produces a very radical form of individuality that also allows for a very independent fellowship. It was never meant to compel anyone to adhere to one or another system that could be no better than the nation that rejected His ways. Rather, the whole thing was a matter of hearts agreeing or not as the Spirit calls to each soul.
Oddly enough, this worked rather well for a short time. This new idea lasted a generation or two before ambitious men decided it was necessary put chains on everyone again. They couldn’t attain power and comfort without finding ways to herd the faithful into convenient sheep pens for shearing. So here we are today with a culture of churches no different from governments in how they use manipulative propaganda to shame people into obeying their mass herding efforts.
I realize that only a precious few people at any given time will hear the call to a more completely individualized faith and religion. It would be easy to criticize the sheeple who substitute the hard work of trusting God directly in exchange for the easy path of letting someone else make all those decisions. But the path to which I’m called requires that I give them that choice, just as I demand for myself the choice to do otherwise. It’s tempting to think myself superior, but that’s just another lie of Satan meant to draw me off course.
But it seems to me that with all the thinking, theorizing and development given to the systems they prefer, very little has been done to bless those who know they can’t go that route. I’m not going to attempt a norming for something that rejects norms in the first place. Rather, I’ll simply tell the story of my nonconformist path and suggest some things God has revealed to bring us closer to Him in the process.
So the book I’m contemplating will offer a kind of psychology that might be useful for other people called to a nonconforming life. It will be one implementation, hoping that others can find clues and cues to a better path for themselves. That’s how God works, so it’s about the only way I can please Him. This is not “doing what’s right in your own eyes.” There’s a clear thread of revelation that sets the boundaries, but those boundaries are seldom where centralizers say they are. I’m trying to go back and identify the ones God established.
“Keep asking “why” until you get to the basic assumptions. God will help you do this.”
Amen, blood.
Those who are called to, are compelled to seek to bind themselves to the heart of God. It took 25 years to drag me out of the mire of organized Evangelical religion just to get a glimpse of the Light. 30 years to submit unconditionally to God as my Sovereign Feudal Lord. So much for front loading or maybe I’m unusually thick, dense, hard headed and hard hearted. The road is hard and long and absolutely, unapologetically and with my whole being; worth every cut, bruise, sorrow, joy, frustration and everything else. I ain’t no wordsmith but, I do mean what I say even if it is simultaneously meant to be understood by mind and heart, literal and parabolic. God directs your heart to know as you are known and there is no system of man think that can approach that. If you are guided by heart, then brain to act? You will get what we reefers* mean. Ed has been granted the gift of ‘splainin’ way gooder than this ol Hillbilly, I just throw in a pocket full of cents ever once in a while.
This concept really seems to speak to me. I would be interested to hear more about how you look at it from a practical standpoint.
But I wonder – is this “choice” that you’re describing, if you want to put it that way, somewhat dependent on personality? I know some very driven and aggressive people who I don’t think would be satisfied simply “sitting around” their whole life contemplating how to better serve God. Not that their satisfaction is the point but it doesn’t seem to suit their personality, which they didn’t choose. Does God really expect this of all people in the same way?
I find myself questioning along similar lines in the manosphere – it seems like many of the purveyors of red pill concepts have similar charismatic and aggressive personalities and it appears to suit them. Maybe less so for other personality types.
Not sure. Just something I’ve wondered about.
My choice is to obey, but the path is something to which I’m called. I realize it’s hard to describe being driven, yet wanting to spend more time in contemplation. I’m not aggressive socially in the sense of an Alpha male having anything in particular I want to accomplish. I’ve done that in the past, but that’s over. I’m not competing with anyone else; I know it’s a solitary calling in many ways. I sense no need to corral others to join my vision for the future. I’m driven to find something that I believe has been lost in the West, and I would really be surprised if very many people took an interest in what I’m doing. I rather expect it would draw just a few. So what I’ll do is try to relate my experience and see if just a few others would benefit from a few of the clues I offer.