By definition, tribulation is tough times. When things get more difficult, you need less dependence, not more. The more extreme the situation, the more flexibility you need to respond to conviction. That means reducing your dependencies in both directions. You need to be less dependent on others, because they have limited resources, too. You also need to carry fewer of your own dependents. Part of the reason for both is that your necessities will likely become a liability for them.
This is why only your immediate household has a divine right to remain fully dependent on you. Their kind of commitment is your life and vice versa. You can barely afford the responsibility for making decisions that affect your family; you can’t take that kind of responsibility for someone who is outside your household. You can’t afford that much blood on your hands when you fail.
It’s one thing to talk about commanders having that kind of liability with their troops. In that context, shedding blood is the whole point. Notice that, in our culture at least, the troops agreed to be in that situation in the first place. A military unit is one, tightly bound group with blood on their minds, if not their hands. Your family has no choice. You assume the liability for them. Nobody else has any business asking you to assume that level of liability. Nobody else can contribute what your family does, so you cannot afford to take care of dependents who aren’t your own flesh and blood, either by covenant or by DNA.
This sounds tough on a covenant community, but the shepherds have limitations. In ancient times, those limitations were not such an issue. They are now. The farther we drift along the path to The End of All Things, the more pressure falls on the individual child of God. We do not live under the Old Testament, wherein spiritual birth was a matter of incubation, and you always had a slew of folks who weren’t there. In Christ, you assume spiritual birth in your community of faith at much higher proportion. Church is voluntary; the Covenant of Moses was a matter of birthright. The New Testament recognizes that family members cannot be presumed spiritually born, so we have guidelines for spiritually mixed marriages. Still, the assumption is “the church body” excludes folks who aren’t spiritually born, family or not. They are included socially only.
Lest you think I’m going back on my teaching about a covenant community being essentially about manifest commitment, because spiritual birth is an unknown, keep in mind that the language of the New Testament itself says we assume spiritual birth in that manifestation. We assume someone who is faithful is so because they are divine family. The issue of differentiating, of saying that we can’t know about spiritual birth, is an organizational premise. We go into our covenant community formation knowing we cannot assess spiritual birth, so we emphasize faith and obedience; those can be assessed. But in terms of reckoning on the mystical elements that we cannot clinically describe, we are presuming that anyone who is faithful can’t fake it forever. They could not do it without the Holy Spirit.
So in order to understand the moral truth here, you have to account for the mystical elements. If I were a covenant community shepherd, persecution introduces exigencies that don’t exist when things are calm and easy for us. The moral budget gets much tighter, in the same way the monetary budget will shrink. We then have to change the administrative procedures on both levels. In order to stick around the covenant community, each member has to bear a greater burden for their own faith.
All my writing online up to now has been for incubation and fletching. Now I have no choice but to kick you out of the nest. I have complete faith that my Father has given you wings, but you’ll either fly or flop on your own. With this time of tribulation and persecution coming, you might survive hiding the bushes, but the whole idea is that you fly. That means putting some distance between yourself and this world.
I’ll meet you in the sky. Let’s talk about flying.
