What Can You Make of It?

This is not fully developed, but I can’t wait to share it. Some of you have discerned that something is cooking in the background, and we’ve talked about it privately. It’s bigger than all of us, thank God. We’ve all gotten bits and pieces of it. I don’t know about you, but it looks to me like it’s all one very big thing God is doing, far more than any of us realized.

I’m not the leader. I’m just one coordinator. Over and over again: This is not about me. I make a lot of noise to a small audience, but God forbid this rest merely on what I’m doing. I’d like to call your attention to something that I don’t believe is just a simple passing manifestation.

It’s more than just the coming apocalypse and persecution. That’s plenty big, and throws a lot of work into our laps by itself. You can stop there if you don’t get a witness in your spirit about it, but for me, it’s turning into just the background for something even bigger. It means a substantial change in how we view things just to see it.

I’ve referenced this week the long view of biblical Hebrew traditions. The hardest thing to get people to embrace is the concept that we are just a small part of something that is ageless. It’s really difficult to get our fleshly natures to accept the idea that God’s primary focus is way beyond the span of our lives. Granted, what I teach is shocking enough for some folks, just grasping the short-term implications of Biblical Law. Our culture does everything possible to keep the focus on the near term. But I’m pushing for an even harder discipline of taking up the duty to engage something that is so overwhelmingly big that we aren’t even significant.

It boils down to realizing that God doesn’t need us at all, but He’s willing to pull us into His eternal work, and share with us the blessings of that vast heritage. This is what reminds me that all my writing is just a bunch of noise, except that God chooses to use it to touch a handful of people. It’s a sense of privilege I cannot begin to characterize. He included me!

Something has been haunting me, and I’ve mentioned it to a few of you in private conversation: Francis Schaeffer and his L’Abri Community. At one time I wanted so badly to be a part of that. Now I’m so thankful it never happened. I suppose it wasn’t such a horrible phase to pass through, but it would have been an awful place to stay camped out. I owe one debt to Schaeffer: He pushed me to contemplate things on a higher level. That contemplation showed me just how wrong he was on so very many things.

I don’t want to build a counter to his L’Abri Community, but it does stand up in my own life as a bad example. His work has faded, in part because it was too deeply tied to politics and a host of other ephemeral things. It rested entirely too much on being a celebrity, and on having other celebrities involved. It was the passing fashion of human culture, and nothing more. How sad. To counter that requires stepping away from the whole model itself.

I’m not building. I’m trying to draw attention to something God is building. Standing with Haggai and Zechariah, my message is: You cannot imagine what God can do with you if you just get with His program. It’s not any one of us, but a whole community, a nation/tribe under covenant. This is why I’m working so hard to restore the meaning of the Biblical Covenant. There’s nothing to build; it’s already there.

So all my work is nothing more than digging up the hidden Temple of Truth that is not at all in ruins. It’s just buried under centuries of accretion, junk that hides the gospel message going all the way back to Eden. And it’s all about heading back to Eden in the first place.

All of which is just fine as the rhetoric to get you awakened to the necessity of our human effort in this world to manifest His glory. I’m hesitant to suggest it, but we can’t avoid using the term “organization.” Not in the sense of forming on a organization, but in the sense of doing something coordinated between us. Don’t join me; join the work of God in progress. Don’t let my vision restrict you. But for my part, I’m hoping to get involved in establishing a body of thinking about faith — that meta-religion thing I keep talking about — that is far bigger than my silly blather. It’s not defining faith; it’s simply exposing it within a given context.

You need to do what God called you to do. For my part, I want to point out how some of us together are doing the same work, but each in our own way. That’s what I mean about coordination. I want to show the unity within our varying efforts. Don’t leave this for me to put into a body of writing alone. If nothing else, your testimony will be a living contribution that will match this bigger picture, even if you write nary a word.

And some of you may continue doing this on the Net, if that’s your calling, but I’ve been commanded rather specifically to pull out of that. Someone else can continue that without me. I’ll keep blogging here, as promised, until it’s no longer possible for whatever reason. But a lot of what shows up here will be about that coordination. I need you to share with me what God is doing in your life. However it is you express that, I want to know about it. Share it somewhere else and I’ll link to it.

Many nights, as I lay down to sleep, I rejoice in the great things God has shown me, and I keep asking how it is I can tell more people. I can’t keep this to myself; it’s not just for me alone, or even just for the few of you who share in this Radix Fidem community. Surely there are more people God would like to bless with this. And I’m starting to get an inkling about how that will happen. I don’t own a Swiss chalet, I don’t have academic connections, and God forbid I should ever have the political connections that Francis Schaeffer had. Whatever it is calling to me excludes such things.

I don’t really know what’s next in broader terms, only that I really need to get some of my writings on paper. That’s the future of my part of this message, and it’s currently rather time consuming. Still, there’s a misty image calling to me from the distance, and what little I can make out is that we need to form a very strong community of people committed to something way beyond the current historical context. There’s something there on the other side of the coming apocalypse. Can you see it? Tell me what you can make of it.