We Shall See Them

When I first felt the Lord’s call on my life some 50 years ago, I thought I knew what it meant. I struggled on that path, but kept getting pushed back and back and back. It wasn’t the people who pushed me back, but the hand of God.

Up until a couple of years ago, I still believed we could just side-step all the others and start with a clean slate. Just sweep away the stuff that doesn’t belong, and we can do covenant community right. But by the time I swept enough away, I discovered there was very nearly nothing left.

It’s like traveling back along a time line, earlier and earlier in the path, looking for a place to start over. At some point you realize you have to go back so very far that it’s very nearly like meeting the Apostles again.

I’m not so arrogant to think we are somehow THE people God has chosen to go back and get it right, as if there were one right answer. But there is for us at least one among some better possible answers. It’s not that we are competing with the answers men have had for the last two millennia; their time is done. God is about to do something very much like the Flood, and it will mean starting down a whole new path. When this flood goes away, the earth will be radically changed, just like it was for Noah. The difference is that God isn’t going to sweep away the rest of humanity. We have to build from scratch on a different plane.

Do I sound like a madman? That’s okay. The world is mad and I’m just a different flavor of crazy.

I can’t know if God plans to help very many people through our testimony of shalom, but I know He intends to help us. For at least some slice of humanity, there’s a message here of faith that is quite radically different from what anyone has heard in a very long time. We can offer it to everyone, but we can’t make them take it.

It doesn’t make us better, just better off. Whether or not it works for anyone else, it works for us.

I’m not writing Scripture, just trying to make the Bible easier to understand. I’m not starting something new, just raising a call to something ancient. I’m trying to echo what Jesus did with His own nation, in that He called them back to the ancient ways. We already have a resurrection, so it’s just a matter of getting back closer to it. We have to touch the living One Himself.

So, I hope and pray I live just long enough to see this thing take root. I believe it’s out there a ways yet. There’s still a major wave of destruction coming, something none of us can imagine. And as always, when God comes to visit, His wrath is one edge of a two-edged sword. That sword has miracles on the other edge. We shall see them if we hold to our faith.

We will see the birth of a new kind of faith, a covenant community. We shall see a large number of people embrace this faith like we did.