Conviction versus Doctrine

Following the Bible Lesson passage in 1 Timothy 4, some good questions came up.

In the early chapters of Genesis we have the story of Noah. One detail has confused people. On the one hand, Noah had to take seven of the “clean animals” but only a breeding pair of the rest. So, there was a primitive “kosher” of sorts regarding animals that were ritually clean. Yet, later on when Noah comes out of the Ark, God says that he could eat anything that moves (9:3).

The “clean animals” were not food for Noah and his family, but were offering animals (8:20). That is, “kosher” referred to ritual offerings; the demand that diet be restricted to them came later under Moses.

The issue was that the nation God built from the Patriarchs was supposed to be distinct as a nation in human terms. The elohim council members had their nations, and God had His. A great deal of the ritual law in Moses was aimed at distinguishing Israel from those other nations. It had nothing to do with the inherent holiness they gained by keeping all those laws; that was never possible. Rather, it was that they were marked out as a separate people from the rest of humanity.

Thus, when Christ died on the Cross, kosher became a dead letter. He indicated this Himself when He said that it was not what went in your mouth that defiled you, but what came out of it. On top of that, Peter’s vision on the rooftop confirmed that kosher was dead, as was the ethnic identity for the Covenant. The period of Israel’s national covenant was bracketed, and on either end of that bracket, kosher was not a matter of dietary restrictions.

Further, with Christ as the final ritual offering, there are no more “clean animals” for sacrificial purposes. The matter is closed. Our Christian identity is not based on distinctions humans understand and control, but on something rooted in Eternity. There is no national identity attached to it.

Most people don’t carry the teaching in 1 Timothy 4 far enough.

Our spirits cannot be redeemed; they are eternal by nature. It is the flesh that needs redemption. This is what the “process of salvation” refers to. We are pulling our flesh away from Satan’s grasp. The Devil retains titular ownership of the flesh, but we are confiscating it from him. We don’t have a fleshly national identity any more; the Old Covenant died on the Cross. Now we have a spiritual identity. It is an invasive thing, reaching into Satan’s turf (this world) and pulling stuff out of his grasp. Think about that image of how the Gates of Hell cannot resist us. Human lives can be rescued from Satan.

There are things that can happen to your flesh that defile you, and some of that is permanent. The most obvious example is sex. You get only one shot at doing it right. All sex creates an undying moral connection with the partner. If your first is a godly choice, then you win — as long as you never stray from that relationship. The moment you do, you are defiled in your flesh. You are permanently crippled for life.

And when you die, it does not follow you into Eternity. It affects only your life here.

Paul was encouraging Timothy to make a clear distinction with this principle. It was part and parcel of the teaching that Timothy could marshal divine power in his apostleship there in Ephesus. Timothy was relatively young, and by human reckoning unqualified, but he was ordained by God. This was an intrusion of the Spirit Realm into the Fallen Realm. To be more precise with our imagery here, it was an exposure of the Spirit Realm’s ultimate truth by peeling back a false layer of fleshly deception.

Divorce and remarriage cripples you in the flesh. You’ll have to live the rest of your life with the defilement, and it will hinder some things. It allows Satan to retain a certain limited authority over your life, and you cannot redeem it from slavery to him. It means you’ll have a tough time with some issues, and it will defile your children — all of them. It doesn’t mean God won’t mitigate the damage; He will choose what He wants to offer on that. Still, it’s something where you get to choose that comes with permanent consequences.

The best analog is what Paul says there about how following certain rules do give you an advantage in this life, but those things have no effect on your eternal destiny. They are good ideas on a human level, but not necessarily a matter of holiness. Holiness is your devotion to God, and He doesn’t give the same convictions to everyone.

Smoking cigarettes is nasty and will kill you, but it’s not a sin in itself. Whether you take care of your diabetes or high blood pressure is a matter of conviction, not holiness. You can eat anything you like, but you should be aware that some foods will shorten your lifespan. Only God can decide whether that matters to Him. He might be planning on bringing you home early.

If God convicts you to be stay fit and healthy, then it’s necessary for you to work with Him to realize how He defines that for your calling and mission. It does not justify making it a doctrine for others to follow. We need to learn the boundaries between matters of personal conviction and matters of divine doctrine.

Note: It’s very easy to see how the various early heresies developed from this. When flesh tries to grasp the above doctrine, it tries to insert human logic. If fleshly failures don’t keep you from going to Heaven, then why bother worrying about righteous action? The answer is because God says He wants us to live by His definition of righteousness, not the human version. He wants us to strive against the flesh and redeem it from slavery. There are choices we can make that hinder this process, some permanently, and those are things we try to avoid.

It is inevitable we will fail at various points. The whole point of “salvation” is not going to Heaven; that’s not why Jesus died on the Cross. The reason He died is to open the Covenant to everyone. The whole point is living a covenant life. We still have work to do here to glorify His name; that’s why we exist in mortal form. Our primary purpose in living is to testify that God alone deserves all glory, honor and praise. The way to carry that out is to discipline the flesh. The law code of past covenants gives us some idea how to do that.