There is a God and Creator. Not only did He make all things, but He owns them as Lord and Master. All of it is alive and accountable to Him. He intended for His whole creation to respond to Him as His children, His extended family household. But at some point, some of His children — humans — took a different path. Doing this moved them outside of His household. It placed them within a world that was false, a Big Lie, something quite different from the blessed life God intended.
The only path back is to restore what was abandoned back inside the household: submission to His moral character as Master and Lord. The biggest hindrance is that life out in the Big Lie creates a wholly different perspective that blinds them to the power that draws some of us to the reality within God’s household. If it depends on making sense according to the Big Lie, then no one will return.
So God does even more of the work for us. He awakens in humans a desire, a driving sense that something is just not right, even if they cannot comprehend exactly what it is. Then He placed cues and clues within the Big Lie so that at least some of the folks would be awakened to what that driving hunger demands. And those who stumble upon this means of returning to His household would live for a time within the Big Lie, giving off even stronger clues and cues to what God intended for us.
He revealed a covenant by which we breathe life into His intentions. It’s meant for us to see that Covenant as a manifestation of what it means to restore the privileges of divine childhood. The boundaries are meant to keep us inside the household, because He has warned over and over that we cannot have those divine privileges if we stray outside of His household.
The mechanism by which He draws us back inside remains invisible to our fallen human perception, but we are told that it is a miracle of His grace. It cannot be understood based on what makes sense from within the Big Lie. It requires the exercise of that ultimate human capability: faith. And the whole point is that we amplify that sense of gnawing hunger by showing the fallen world what it’s like to taste the provision from God’s household table. We are the delicious aroma of His provision.
It remains for us that there are two tracks through life in this Big Lie. There is the Covenant by which we return to Him. And then there is everything else. That “everything else” outside of the Covenant is any number of ways humans might imagine the world works. All humans have an instinct that causes them to seek a frame of reference for dealing with this Big Lie, but without that element of faith to see what’s really real, the answers will always arise from within the Big Lie. It will seem random where God says there is a divine purpose. Thus, the bulk of humanity will at all times live under a very false narrative of life.
We who live under the Covenant have no business asking those outside to take us seriously. They cannot. Without that divine faculty of faith in the forefront of their consciousness, they simply do not have the ability to take us seriously, except on their own terms. And those terms are from within the Big Lie. There is a serious mismatch there. Instead, it is we who hold forth a proper standard by which we judge all things. We should never want to be taken seriously by those under the Big Lie. We should hope to demonstrate the jarring discontinuity between their false perception and how God blesses us through His revelation.
Only those within whom the Father has awakened faith can hear our message. We need to carry a basic assumption, as a matter of practice in any given context, that humanity at large will never get it. Some few will, and it is these for whom we keep an open eye. There is no way our human abilities will take them across that eternal boundary. But if God moves them, He also grants us the ability to see it by our own faith, and so we are there to heal their wounds and help them exercise the clear sight of their new faith.
This is what fellowship means. It is the place where we gather within that Covenant, with a far higher faith perception of what’s real. Our whole purpose is to press forward with the changes the Covenant demands. We don’t have to accomplish anything; we are driven to draw closer to His image, His Son, who is the very incarnation of His Covenant. It’s all personal; we are getting acquainted with people, not mere ideas.
