Don’t get lost in the particulars; reach for a grasp of the fundamental moral elements.
The Covenant of Christ is the one and only covenant God honors. In case it’s not obvious, the Code of Noah is simply the law portion of that covenant. Every covenant in history had a package of definitions that met the context with examples of what it looks like to keep peace with God. The real issue is your personal submission to the Lord. If you don’t have that personal connection, all the obedience you can muster will miss the point.
What is the Covenant Law of Christ? It cuts through all the crap and says that our lives on this earth are wrapped up in manifesting His commitment to His Elect. If we love as He loved, then we all consign our fleshly existence to the Cross. Instead of striving for what the flesh desires, we strive for what the Holy Spirit desires.
Stand-alone holiness has no meaning; there must be a context. The whole point of Scripture is how you deal with God and the world He created. This week’s Bible lesson in 1 Peter recalls a critical paradox: On the one hand, your commitment to Christ should be obvious and it should generate conflict with the fallen world around you. If you walk like Christ, you will make enemies among those who do not walk by His Spirit. On the other hand, His Elect will be drawn to you. Maybe not all of them, but some of them.
It’s easy to provoke hostility in this world. Our community has warned often that human nature is intractably warlike. That’s a critical element in the Fall and our mortal existence, and God has no intention of removing it from this world. The only way to end hostility is to end the flesh. War comes in the same package as breathing the air. To live as humans demands that we be prepared for conflict and learn how the Lord wants us to handle it. Much of Scripture is devoted to discussing how to do war. And a big part of that discussion is that we do not simply ignore anything we don’t like, but take the time to confer with God how to work around the idiocy of fallen humanity.
While there are any number of ways you can provoke human fallen hostility, it should always be a direct result of how you love your fellow Elect. While we may find it amusing to see fallen souls provoked by various human foibles, that sense of humor cannot justify any particular actions. Notice and laugh; there is plenty of amusement coming from the people who don’t know the Lord. However, we are not permitted to go among them and prank them for our own amusement. All of our actions must stem from a redemptive purpose.
Our Kiln of the Soul community feels the hand of God leading us to devote some time and resources to facing the coming tribulation by redoubling our efforts to express the Law of Christ in our context here and now. It’s not that our answers are definitive for anyone else anywhere else, but that they will be definitive for us. It’s time to go back up on our own Mount Sinai to receive from God a refreshing of His Covenant for the journey ahead. There are a lot of people in slavery who will need guidance for their exodus, and we need to cover the bases that others don’t.
Again, the Covenant has no meaning without community. The whole point of a covenant is building a community in feudal submission to God. Being Elect is the ultimate identity, the tribal affiliation to end all others. No other identifying factors matter. But God made it clear He expects us to gather in small communities like extended family households so that we all have our own little tribes that look different in one way or another from the next. The only unifying principle is our commitment to Him, and He is the one who demands that we proliferate into thousands of tiny nations. While that might be beneficial for the rest of the world to follow that model, it is utterly essential for His Elect.
That’s because we are not led by principles and objectives, but by people. Each of the thousands of elders and priests that God appoints among His Elect will have their own unique approach and there must be variations. Not variation for its own sake, but variations that are unavoidable due to convictions. There’s an awful lot of ink spilled in the Bible talking about how to handle those differences, and it’s a sure bet that American mainstream churches aren’t the answer for everyone. We gladly allow them to continue along their paths, but we are called to something different. They cannot possibly serve the needs of everyone God calls to His Kingdom.
For at least the next few posts, this blog will invest time looking at how we might formulate a sort of law code that manifests the Covenant in our time and place.
