You’ve heard it before: If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. Let me add: If you want to make God smile, ask Him about His plans.
I realize how radical a shift it is for Americans to invest themselves, with all their hopes, dreams and expectations, in the thesis of the Unseen Realm. If that outlook calls your name, it’s a monumental task changing your mental habits to match a new reality. You won’t be able to do this without the power of the Holy Spirit.
Consistent with His character and history, God is warning His people that tribulation is coming. That has leaked out into society at large. You can find sharp minded analysis from lots of people. They can see what’s happening, but their expectations assume no substantial divine power in their analysis. The best you can say is that, if God doesn’t intervene (as He typically does) then this is where we are headed.
But a biblical viewpoint is to assume God will have His hand in things, and the smartest of human estimates will miss in one way or another. The best hope is to invest yourself in studying what God has said and done in the past. More to the point, you must invest yourself in keeping warm relations with Him, because He does share His plans with His people.
The biggest difficulty is getting His people to think in terms of what He actually does. They will get impressions in their convictions that they often misread because their heads are too deeply invested in human concerns. They mistakenly believe that humans can evaluate good and evil and come up with a valid plan of action, and that human needs actually matter. God says they don’t.
I’m not saying He won’t grant your requests, even your silliest ones. He does that, but His motives are not at all what most people have been taught. The whole point is His glory, and it’s very much a strong cultural image from the past. The only way you can really understand God is to adhere to the packaging in which revelation was delivered to mankind. He portrayed Himself as a near eastern potentate, a nomad sheikh, and still acts very much like that. If you can’t absorb that motif, you will never really understand God.
This is one place where I differ strongly from Heiser. In one of his podcasts, he said that God simply operated within the culture of the Israelites because that was what He had to work with. As you should know by now, I insist that God knowingly built the culture of Israel because it was the clearest way to reveal Himself. In other words, my take is that there are substantial hints in the culture of Israel that form the substance of truth about human existence in this fallen realm.
The teachings of Jesus and Paul point to that idea, promoting what Heiser thought were mere cultural trappings. There’s no way to reconcile this difference. If you want my spiritual covering, you’ll have to tolerate my take on things. There is still a very substantial organization carrying on Heiser’s work if you prefer to join that (and here, among other places).
Just the stuff he and I do agree on will tend to marginalize you. Because the biblical path is so radically different from the mainstream, it naturally calls for pulling out of the mainstream. How far should we go? I’ll suggest some measures, but it’s best if you read between the lines. The substance of our worldly existence is as a tribal feudal covenant community. There’s no way to impose that on anyone who doesn’t first dismiss the core values of American society and history. People must volunteer for the Covenant, and leave everything behind. Doing so is a miracle, because it really makes no sense on a human level.
We expect to have no influence on the world at large. The only good we can do in this life is to help a few people whom the Lord calls to our path. Let the world go wherever the Devil and his allies lead it; God has delivered it into their hands for a time. It will all be destroyed at some point. Meanwhile, He redeems individuals that He pulls out of this realm and into His family household.
