No Christ without Mysticism

Abraham was God’s chosen foundation. He brought with him a very strong background in mystical studies. When his progeny later passed into the Nile Delta for a time, that mystical background was enhanced by contact with the Egyptian version. Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s court, and then got a strong dose of reconnection with the Mesopotamian background from his father-in-law. His time on Mount Sinai was the final refinement of his academic background. The result was Hebrew culture and tradition.

By the time Babylon came and took Judah into Exile, things had changed in Mesopotamia. It was still fairly mystical, but the element of materialism had already entered the stream. The Persian conquest made it worse. By the time that tiny minority returned to Jerusalem, the seeds of destruction were starting to bear fruit.

The prophets castigated them for their loss of mysticism. Two primary failures crop up again and again.

One I’ve already mentioned: The Judeans had lost their sense of history. Their focus was upon their own generation, instead of seeing themselves in a very long stream of history. Granted, the nation had failed often to adhere to the Covenant, but there had always been the foundation for restoration. That foundation had been severely eroded in Babylon, and was in desperate need of rebuilding among the returnees. They kept abandoning it. They had lost the sense of being one stone in a very long paved road, and could not embrace the concept that shalom is a multi-generationl investment.

The infrastructure commitment is a high investment up front, and has a long lead time for rebuilding. They were impatient with God’s provision. We have a desperate need for this perspective. We are just now recovering some elements of moral infrastructure with the Radix Fidem teaching, and it’s far harder for us when everything around us rejects that long-term view. We are not apes waking up in a new world every generation. We have to build now so that the blessings of shalom can manifest in future generations.

The second failure of Judah was the related understanding that we are mortal beings in a fallen world. It’s not that they didn’t see death coming eventually, but that they simply didn’t accept the idea that God had other things to deal with that they would never understand. They were needy petulant children demanding all of God’s attention right now. They had none of Job’s maturity (Job was middle-aged, not an old man). They had none of Elihu’s grasp that life sucks in the first place, and we should want to escape it. Judah wanted God to fix things in this world, when He had already warned it wouldn’t happen.

His promises are more than sufficient to our needs,and that provision is already at work. Claiming to be God’s people does not oblige Him to drop everything and run to our rescue at any moment. He can foresee the trouble our flaws will cause us, and has already made more provision than we can comprehend. We have to pay our dues and work through this mess. We must cease whining about the discomforts and recognize our place in this fallen realm.

All of this was well within Abraham’s grasp, even if he also failed to exercise faith at every moment. He at least had the education to see these things, as did Job and Elihu. The Restoration Judeans lacked that depth of philosophical background. They couldn’t be bothered to invest the time to put it all back.

It never was a part of our Western heritage. There is nothing here to restore. We have to depart our Western legacy completely in order to go back to what God built. We have to embrace something we never had before, and pray that God will allow us to recover something His people threw away. This is all part of what it means to claim the Blood of Christ. Jesus Himself taught these things, and it’s time we made it a point to start building on His footprints.

If you aren’t a Christian Mystic, you aren’t really a Christian at all.