Nothing Else Matters

I’m not the first to discuss this: The Old Testament makes mention of spiritual birth.

When Nicodemus interviewed Jesus in John 3, we see the elder man’s confusion over the concept of spiritual birth. But Jesus answered from within the Covenant of Moses, so it’s not as if this was a new teaching, but a forgotten teaching of the Covenant. Take a look at the following passages: Psalm 51:6 & 10; Jeremiah 31:33-34; Ezekiel 11:19-20.

You’ll notice they don’t call it spiritual birth, but use a different parabolic image to say the same thing. This is not unique to the Hebrew people alone. They were well within the traditions of the wider Ancient Near East (ANE). That tradition assumed a priori that it as impossible to use clinical language for moral and spiritual matters. Rather, it was necessary to use symbols, parables and metaphors to talk about that sort of thing. They assumed the mind could not handle such matters, that only in the heart-mind could one discern the unspeakable truths. Outsiders to the Covenant would speak of Old Testament saints as having a spirit of the gods in them. They knew about spiritual birth, too.

The Old Testament never doubted the need for spiritual birth, regardless of how you want to verbalize it. It was inherent in the story of the Fall. God warned that if you insist on using your human capabilities to decide good and evil (AKA eating of the Forbidden Fruit), then you would spiritually die. Adam didn’t physically die for another 900 years after being driven out of the Garden, so God wasn’t referring to immediate physical death. He was referring to being forced into a mortal frame (AKA driven out of the Garden), which up that point was not a problem for Adam and Eve. Once having lost their spiritual nature (AKA access to the Tree of Life), they now needed a spiritual birth. They needed their faith and trust in divine revelation reborn.

So the assumption from the start was that this life sucks, and our only hope is to endure until the Lord takes us Home. The Book of Job rests on that concept. In the Covenant of Moses, God introduces a regime of learning about His divine moral character. Across the entire ANE, this was the common assumption about the covenants human rulers offered to their subjects. The Code of Hammurabi assumes an understanding that law is merely an outline of the ruler’s character. You were supposed to get to know the ruler as a person by what he said was important. So what God did at Mount Sinai was not entirely new, but an unusual implementation of an old idea.

Thus, while God was promising to make life tolerable, even somewhat pleasant at times, nobody was supposed to forget that God was being exceedingly generous, when all of humanity starts out deserving a miserable life, a sorrowful death, and eternity in torment. It was widely noted that by embracing the Covenant, you could take a path that would make you closer to God. He was perfectly willing to offer His Spirit in the deal, so that you could gain your own internal compass about what the Law was meant to do. The Covenant would then make perfect sense to you, and you would have far less trouble embracing it. But based on what God does say about it, we know that the Covenant as the gateway to that spiritual birth.

You were obliged to exercise the one human capability God left open to all of the human race: You had to engage your heart of conviction. If you were able to make a genuine commitment of faith to Jehovah, you could receive His Spirit. Gee, that doesn’t sound so different from the New Testament, eh?

Later, the New Testament writers began stating more bluntly some of the basic assumptions that no one in the Old Testament felt it was necessary to discuss. They knew they were addressing Jews with a deep Talmudic taint that buried those ANE assumptions, along with Gentiles who never had Hebrew thinking in their backgrounds in the first place. The New Testament was not a radical departure from the Old. It was not new teaching, but renewed teaching.

The primary difference is that Jesus translated the Covenant terms and boundaries from an earthly political national covenant to an otherworldly spiritual covenant that included the whole human race. That was something akin to the original intent of Moses in the first place, in that you’ll notice all those references to taking the gospel to the Gentiles in the New Testament. But it was the same basic gospel as the Old Testament, but with new conditions. The one very substantial change is that, instead of passing first through the Law and the issue of national identity, one could simply make that same heart-led commitment in faith to the New Covenant, largely sight unseen.

You still have to go back and learn the covenant requirements, but you can do it with His Spirit before you start digging into it.

Paul’s language in Romans about the Elect and predestination is actually right out of the Old Testament, but almost nobody recognizes it that way. Paul even explains it in OT terms, using the Pharaoh of the Exodus, but people still don’t get it. “Jacob I loved; Esau I hated.” You don’t need to grasp that with your reason; it’s a matter of faith. Tell your reason to accept the premise and build from there, and stop trying to question the premises. That’s an ANE idea, too.

So, if we are all fallen and born into mortal flesh, then we are all born with dead spirits. We all need rebirth. Joining any church is supposed to give you a leg up on learning about that faith requirement God has never changed, but only if the church leadership is doing it right. Somehow folks are still assuming that Christianity can be jiggered into a national identity that somehow gets you halfway into Heaven. Thus, you would have to fall quite a ways to become Hell-bound again. Western Christians have this unquestioned assumption in the backs of their minds that you have to make some kind of effort to belong to Satan.

Wrong. You belong to Satan wholly and completely regardless of being a member of any church, and perhaps all the more so because you were born in the “Christian” West. Satan doesn’t put any effort into keeping folks, because the whole world, and all of its cultures and civilizations, belong to him by default. And as long as they belong to him on those terms, they are absolutely incapable of wanting out of his hands.

It requires a divine miracle. Nothing, nothing, NOTHING humans can do will change that. A mere human psychological conversion is not spiritual birth; sales-pitch evangelism leaves most people still spiritually dead. It’s no chore whatsoever for Satan to keep people in his domain. No matter what his captives do, they will forever remain captive. In that sense, they cannot possibly do anything pleasing to God. Mankind cannot possibly accomplish anything that matters; being human is the signature of futility. Everything mankind has done will be wiped away when Christ returns.

By the same token, Satan has no say whatsoever when God decides to breathe His Spirit into anyone anywhere. So the only real work for Satan is to do whatever he can to keep you from getting hold of the heritage that comes with that spiritual birth. You were selected from before Creation, so it’s just a matter of time from your human perspective until God finds a way to awaken your attention to that truth. The entire range of divine revelation is aimed at helping you figure out what comes with that spiritual awakening. This is why I say that Biblical Law is a privilege.

Thus, everything that matters to God takes place on the battlefield of the individual human awareness. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. All my blather about Spiritual Warfare pertains to this one thing: you becoming aware of what God intended for you. Satan spends no effort at all on anything except thwarting your awareness, and the choices you make based on that changed awareness. Nothing else matters.