I’ve always rejected the prevailing culture. From my earliest memories, I knew the world I lived in was not right. But instead of being a rebel, I was more nerdy, in withdrawing somewhat into a fantasy world. It wasn’t mere childhood stuff; this was me searching for a better reality, without drugs and other forms of escapism.
I kept searching for a Word from God, though I surely would not have characterized it that way until much later. The search was among a lot of other possible worlds until I began to sense a divine purpose and calling that saw me abandon some of those options. Still, I bore an awful lot of baggage I never even knew I could reject, so it took a very long time.
Meanwhile, I knew beyond all doubt that I belonged to Christ. So I kept trying to serve Him in the existing system. I even went so far as to visit a lot of different kinds of churches, which pissed off my parents. Even into adulthood I kept searching. Nothing was any more comfortable than the church in which I grew up, so I went back to that, but only because it was simply more familiar. At some point, that also played out, and I left mainstream religion for good, in part because it was clear the leadership didn’t want me around.
On the one hand, I’m utterly certain mainstream religion has a lot of things wrong. There may have been some early bitterness at rejection, but I’m long past that. I’d love to share with them the peace I’ve found with the God they claim, the peace they believe in, but never find for themselves. Or, to be more precise, a quality of peace they’ve never found so far. On the other hand, I don’t expect them to come running when I announce there’s something better. Still, I can’t simply sit in silence; I must testify.
Today I make much of the Covenant, AKA Biblical Law. I prefer the term “covenant” for a lot of reasons, not least because it’s the best English word we have for what really matters. All it really needs is a nudge to get people thinking about what it means from a biblical Hebrew perspective. The labels we use on parts of the Bible — “testament” — is mostly a synonym for covenant. We have the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. The difference is that “testament” implies a written record of something that isn’t confined to the words.
Still, I know that my effort to promote living under the Covenant in the Hebraic sense is not the popular meaning of the term. I still have to explain it every time I mention it to an audience outside our Radix Fidem community. Indeed, that explanation is the bulk of what I have to say to outsiders, churchian or otherwise. I do my best to portray the full realization of what it means to embrace the Covenant, especially in terms of what it demands from us.
Living the Covenant means setting your foot on a lifelong path of leaving behind the prevailing society. It doesn’t have to mean you ape my choices, but it surely means withdrawing a good distance from the world into which you were born. There are a lot of different directions that you can go, but if you aren’t recognizably on the same path I’m on, however far off on your own parallel, I have no obligation to take you seriously.
It feels pretty lonely out here. But I know that has more to do with the overwhelming noise we get from every other choice humans make, against what appears to be such a slender slice of humanity opting to take the Covenant seriously. There is no doubt in my mind quite a few folks out there are on the same path, but I can’t spot them over the herds running in the wrong direction. There’s simply too many in the herd and too few on the path.
By God’s mercy and grace, that could some day change. It’s the same grace and mercy that allowed me to find such a wonderful Covenant wife. In one sense, we were made for each other. It’s not as if we couldn’t both have found adequate mission-minded spouses elsewhere, but that God steered us together at the right moment to find the best either of us was likely to encounter for a very long time and distance in life. We are blessed, indeed.
Side note: I don’t buy into the false humility about whether I’m the best God had for my wife. I won’t take seriously any such false humility from her, either. After our 40+ years together, and all we’ve encountered along the way, we both know we could not have done better than what we have now. I’m sure we could have found partners more or less adequate and bearable, but this kind of joy is not possible without the miracle touch of God. We certainly didn’t have full knowledge when we started, but it became obvious rather early that there was no reason to look for greener pastures in any sense. If I didn’t believe God had called me to be her man, and her my woman, I wouldn’t have wasted her time.
That’s because the whole point has always been the Covenant mission, which is actually enhanced by our partnership. And nobody has to tell me just how rare this kind of marriage is. I’ve seen the weakness in thousands of marriages, and how it distracts from the Covenant mission. The best we can do is ask God to heal what He will, and in the meantime do our best to demonstrate just how well it can work when folks choose to live under the Covenant.
It’s a very major part of our shalom witness. This is a demonstration of what God can do when His people fully walk in the Covenant.
Was thinking of brainstorming (I hate that word, but it fits) on a word that would describe what we believe, that encompasses the major concepts. Something easily communicable. Academics make up words all the time, why can’t we? 🙂
From where I sit, I keep bumping into the issue of that pool of meaning people associate with the words that meet the need. It’s a bad pool of meaning they put with those words. The second biggest issue is that there have been no end of forked religions seizing those words and saddling them with all the bad baggage. How do you communicate the idea that Western epistemology is all wrong in just a few words? And how do you get the attention of folks who have no idea what “epistemology” means? There are a thousand roadblocks in the flesh, so the whole thing rests with the miracle of God as our publicist. But by all means, let’s not stop trying to find all the shortcuts He’ll give us.