There is no clear and logical break point. When we talk about renewing the Covenant, you are not supposed to start thinking in precise definition of terms. That’s the wrong approach to anything regarding faith and religion. You are supposed to turn inward and seek the Lord’s divine Presence to tell you what you really need to know about.
Words are not containers of meaning with precise definition. Words are used as signboards pointing the way to territory in your soul that needs exploring. The entire meaning of Radix Fidem is more about tossing away bad habits that restrict you from the full heritage of God’s Kingdom, than it is about new definitions. The idea is to set you free from the chains, from the lies of our culture so that you can begin exploring what God has for you.
“The Covenant” refers to your personal commitment to Christ. It is a covenant with boundaries that define privileges, not restrictions. You don’t have to let sin rule in your mortal bodies; you can embrace the boundaries of God that keep you out of Satan’s territory. He provides the power and the wisdom to choose. All you bring to it is the desire burning in your heart to please Him.
It’s really that simple.
What you then make of the Bible — the written record of experiences with those boundaries — in terms of guiding your religion, is between you and Christ. The next task is to discern who it is He wants you to work with. You can fellowship with almost anyone, but to actually form a community and engage the task of fighting the Enemy requires a commonality, which naturally means an exclusion of folks who aren’t close enough to make communion possible. You don’t sin by coming up with a different answer than mine, but you do limit yourself from communion with me when your answers are too different in too many places. Go find someone else to work with; you have my blessings as you search.
Fighting the Enemy is heavy on discerning whether the people you encounter are family, allies or outsiders. Fighting the Enemy is properly handling those folks based on your best heart-led assessment, and observing the boundaries the Bible outlines for each category. It means discriminating. It means not throwing your pearls to swine, or feeding offerings to dogs. It means tolerating a lot of social pressure because you will be quite different in your human habits in order to please the Father. It means focusing on the hard work of relating to other humans appropriately, according to how they position themselves within the structure of reckoning our God requires us to hold forth as our witness.
In many ways, Israel was an experiment that proved this is way things have to be. You cannot create a large nation based on human organization, even when that organization follows precisely what divine revelation required. It’s not that His Word failed, but that people in large groups are too badly broken to seize the blessings. The human tendency under human structure is destructive. It’s not possible for written revelation to do much more than provide a stable environment for seeking spiritual unity. You still have to do the work — every individual — to seek the Lord’s face in a very personal union with His Spirit. He revealed that it would fail to some degree, even when human potential reaches its maximum.
We do have the mitigation that God will place His hand on a community with solid spiritual leadership, but this doesn’t solve the basic problem. Rather, it means that He sponsors a miraculous atmosphere in which individuals are encouraged to grow in the Spirit. In other words, it only works when a Law Covenant is used as an incubator, not when it’s used as the final product. The bulk of Israeli people in the Bible narrative were always trying to make it out as the product, except when they were trying to make it the incubator for a less spiritual life.
So the only real answer is to make sure that every little congregation, every little extended household of faith, is as independent as possible. The multitude of households can then associate or disassociate as the context dictates while each seeks to find their own path of Covenant obedience. It’s meant to be an ebb and flow. It’s meant to be alive.
Organization and unity across the bodies is not a major requirement of faith. What matters most is the daily dynamic of people within a given body struggling to keep faith alive in how they fellowship and commune. The work is simply being together, of always seeking that balance point that permits individual calling within the nest of love and support that family households provide. It’s enabling the individual path of spiritual development. That’s what churches do. How you balance between the individual versus the group is part of the variables you have to adjust moment by moment.
Growing in numbers is more or less automatic as a side-effect; it’s not a valid goal in itself. Too much of it is in God’s hands. Touching the lives of those around you is a goal, whether they join the body or not. “Reaping souls ready for harvest” does not mean persuading them to join your church. It means touching them with spiritual fire and loving them regardless what they do. But that touching of lives must take place within the boundaries of the Covenant, and the actual on-the-ground reality of what that looks like is variable and dynamic, as the Spirit leads. The specifics of the boundaries are set by your community leadership in a dynamic atmosphere. It’s a lot of give and take and God really does want you to be feudal about it. It’s a burden on you to work with your leaders, but it’s an even bigger burden on them to misjudge and then clean up the mess it makes.
Growing the budget is merely a human factor that means damned little. Growing facilities? Are you stupid? Such things are not sacred. Budget and facilities are just tools, things you can abandon when they no longer serve the purpose of the day. Be faithful with divine provision, but never hesitate to walk away from some merely physical infrastructure that can’t follow you into the future. The people come first, and that’s not just a slogan. This is a family household, not a corporation. It’s a tribal family that owns property in common, but obeys the decisions of the human head of household in disposition of that physical property.
It’s the give and take that sees elders typically appointed for life and die, but then also quit, or sometimes be deposed. It’s the kind of thing where priestly folks can keep out of such concerns while keeping an eye and hand on the spiritual health of the family. There can be protocols, but rules tend to bend and break in the real world. It’s taking for granted some of the nitty-gritty of human turmoil as the testing ground against which you strive to shine the Lord’s glory. The church doesn’t have to “succeed” as humans measure such things. It succeeds simply by adhering to the process.
So this business of emphasizing the Covenant is not really about Biblical Law, but it will appear that way to those who don’t see from the heart. We emphasize Biblical Law in the flesh, but that’s because it’s just a parable of walking with Christ. Christ is Biblical Law. We seek to manifest the divine moral character through something that we call “law” because that’s the English word for what God speaks to His servants. His personality is the real “law” and we are just trying to capture something of that personality by pointing out boundaries that seem to make some limited sense to the fleshly intellect.
