First, a little review. We know that the fundamental nature of spiritual warfare is fighting your own demons. Your own soul is the battleground. The phrase “victory in Jesus” refers to vanquishing your own fleshly nature; it has nothing to do with the world around us. You can’t really defeat the Devil in the world at large, only in your own domain. If your heart rules over your reactions in this life, then you are truly the master of your domain.
All of God’s covenant promises to Israel stood on this. Everything that was painted in terms of defeating the enemies of the nation stood on having defeated your own inner demons first. If you were truly devoted to Jehovah as Lord, then those images could have a literal application. However, without a spiritual victory in your soul, those promises remained unclaimed. Your heart had to serve the Lord before your earthly domain could defeat your enemies.
The meaning of the name “Israel” hung on the Covenant, not Jacob’s DNA. Thus, even under the Law of Moses, it was never a matter of being children of Jacob-Israel, but children of God. If the people stood in the full realization of being a member of His household, nothing earthly could be denied them. Without walking in Jehovah’s divine moral character, all the rote obedience they could muster meant nothing.
The whole issue turned not on the body of law, but in the heart-led obedience to conviction. The Covenant assumes that if you are truly devoted to the Lord, He can always carve out exceptions for most things. The verbal code was not the Law, but a mere manifestation of it. The ultimate manifestation of Biblical Law was the Person of the Messiah. In that sense, Jesus was the Covenant Himself, and still is today.
On the other hand, there could be issues with the covenant community. There was always this theoretical space in which truly following your convictions could get you in trouble with the community. Your convictions, of course, assumed seeking the benefit of the covenant community, of seeking shared shalom, but that doesn’t mean the community will agree with your choices, or even understand. If you could have a conversation today with people who were educated in ANE epistemology, they would all agree that you simply embraced that risk.
If it meant deciding between your convictions and the community, you always stood by your convictions. That was in the community’s best interest on a fundamental moral level. And the ANE people were otherworldly, so the idea of facing death for the sake of a private conviction was just part of being a human. But that convictions were the absolute imperative would never have been questioned by ANE philosophical assumptions.
Only in the West is it somehow “holy” to ignore your convictions for the sake of uniformity with the community. At the same time, it’s somehow sacred to follow your own impulses and not care a whit about anyone else. Notice how these two extremes are incompatible with each other, yet proudly promoted in our society. It’s a false dichotomy; together they are incompatible with the biblical assumptions about reality.
Putting your convictions first was inherent in the Biblical Law. The Word trains your awareness to grasp the imperatives of faith and conviction. The Law must be written on your heart first, or it meant nothing. You and I know that we live in a world that rejects all of this. Indeed, the world today rejects even the pretense of adhering to any biblical covenant. So we are reminded that we operate with each foot in two different worlds. Romans 13 says you make it a policy to obey as best you can the laws of men, but in the final analysis, all you really owe the world is your devotion to Christ. If you walk in agape, you have done all that the Lord asks you to do about human government.
So, for example, kindness is not law; it is a default policy. We want to offer kindness and mercy, but sometimes sacrificial love (agape) for the covenant community demands that we withhold mercy from specific individuals who threaten shalom. That’s the point: Your covenant community comes before the entire rest of the human race. No other agency can hold a tribal loyalty over your head. Their claims on your loyalty are invalid without the Covenant. Once you belong to Christ, all other identities are merely incidental and provisional.
Thus, anyone who threatens covenant shalom is taking a risk, whether they are inside or outside the covenant. We are morally obliged to offer a level of mercy to covenant family that we must deny to those outside the covenant. Given the dispersed context in which our covenant community exists, it rests entirely on your convictions whether the person you deal with warrants covenant mercy. There are a lot of people claiming Christ that don’t know Him, and that He does not know. Even more so, a secular edict that you are required to treat everyone equally whom the State claims as its own is simply not valid. For this reason, efforts to conflate the Cross with the American flag are anathema. America has never been a covenant nation.
The Covenant is not optional for us. It is the core identity of who we are in this world. Everything you encounter must be evaluated from the Covenant perspective. Without the Covenant this is no covering; Satan has full authority outside the Covenant.
American society allows rebellion, but only within a certain approved range. Some people having different ranges of what is acceptable, and sometimes they overlap. Whatever could be biblically-inspired rebellion will probably fall outside of the range of most people, unfortunately.