Basic biblical truth: No human political construct will last very long, at any scale. From a clan to a whole civilization, none of them can possibly last very long. Given the nature of our unstoppable decline to the final apocalypse and Christ’s return, the time line of collapse will shorten progressively. God will not allow humans to build something that excludes Him. More to the point, He does not tolerate structures that ignore His Word.
That still leaves a lot of room to operate. He still favors and grants relative stability and longevity to any political construct that honors Him. Get the picture: Israel was a special case. God redeemed the most difficult nation that ever arose in human history as a special demonstration of His Word. Their national covenant was unique to them; it could not possibly apply to any other people. But it signals that a covenant with Him is always possible. To the rest of the world, the Covenant of Noah has always held out the promise of stability and hope for a future.
It’s never been tried, so far as we can determine. It appears there have been a few partial attempts, but they are lost in the mists of pre-history. We have only legends and hints. The point is that it hasn’t been tried in a very long time on any significant scale.
This whole business of covenants assumes a community. You can discern guidance for individual living, but the whole point is to build something bigger than any individual. It’s part of the fundamental nature of revelation that the individual is the foundation of faith, but the community is always the primary objective. The discipline of dealing with oneself in the context of other fallen people is the whole point.
The individual must strive for community as the goal. Realistically, you should expect it to fail often. You should expect that the vast majority of people you encounter will balk at the demands of the Covenant. They’ll demand everything except what they really need from you and from God. We are pulling people away from the various societies and cultures of our world, and it’s no small jump. Yes, some are worse than others, and the American society is among the worst. Still, everything you do has the goal of enticing someone away from their false dying world into one that could live.
Over and over again, the Lord has promised through His prophets that if only we could seize the vision, be seized by the vision, we could harvest a wealth of peace and joy. Jesus said that He would be manifested in community in ways that individuals cannot experience alone: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name…” Every such gathering is a church, never mind whether anyone recognizes it officially. It’s a church, a manifestation of the Lord, for as long as it endures.
Leaning how to relate to other humans in accordance with the Covenant is our path to this. The whole of the Law has only ever been to love your God as He requires and your covenant brother/sister as yourself. Those two commandments are the two edges of the same sword to cuts down all the lies of Hell. Get your hands on that, and all the hordes of evil will fall.
