There is a huge difference between our western viewpoint and that of the Bible. It manifests in one primary flaw: the notion that our democratic expectations came from God. The notion of fairness and equality is from Hell, not from Heaven. The Bible flatly says that God plays favorites, and that the majority of humanity will not be welcomed into His Presence. Nor is the Bible itself a democratic document. Not only does God make it opaque to those outside His family, but even those inside His family must work for a clear understanding.
God did not create this vast difference between us and our Savior. We did. We did it by cooperating with the Devil’s agenda in shifting human culture away from God’s chosen means of revelation. Divine revelation came within a nation and culture that even the nation itself eventually abandoned.
The whole point of revelation on Mount Sinai was to build a culture for walking in the image of God. The key element was never a matter of how to prosper in this world, but to keep that image alive. God wants people to look like His family. He promises to provide the means to do that. Everything else is strictly secondary. The core issue is not what God grants us, but what He demands of us.
The Kiln of the Soul parish aims to heed His call to that image. It was meant to be the primary mission of Israel, but they got it backwards. They twisted it into a commitment to their own primacy over the rest of humanity. Instead of calling the world to serve God, they demanded that the world serve their worldly comfort. Jesus came to call His nation back to their divine mission, but they refused and killed Him to emphasize their refusal. Jesus turned that rejection on its head, restoring through Himself the path for anyone in the world to join in being the image of God.
Following Christ is not merely an individual choice. It is the call to join a community under His Covenant. His personal statement about His law at the Last Supper was inherently communal in nature. That covenant is fundamentally feudal; democracy and the pretense of objectivity was dreamed up by Satan to distract us from the Covenant. We are building His Kingdom, a kingdom of hearts.
It’s a long path that has over time gotten longer. The same Lucifer that deceived humanity in the first place has not ceased to deceive us. He has built up any number of strongholds to keep us in thrall to his folly. Scripture portrays the magnitude of the task of building and maintaining the structure of God’s image in us. The idea that a surface reading of the Bible in your native tongue is enough to make you into God’s image is not even in the Bible itself. The Scriptures portray a grand endeavor of discerning and embracing a whole different culture, an epic task because we are so very far where Christ stands.
It does not require a degree, but it does require study. And the task is made difficult because the people who should be our allies keep turning out to be enemies. Church people are so busy building their human institutions that they pervert the educational process itself. When God calls out from the church people to build a better representation of Himself, the whole establishment fights it.
Kiln of the Soul parish accepts the challenge.
I’m thinking of 1 Corinthians 12 here. It feels as though there needs to be a minimum number of people in a church/covenant body, or one person with time and energy set apart, who is able to study and teach what is necessary.