Nobody has to tell me that my previous post stirred up a hornets’ nest. The challenge here is shifting your expectations and mental reflexes over to a genuine Hebrew outlook. What did the Hebrews prior to the introduction of Hellenism believe? Jesus kept calling His nation back to the ancient Hebrew ways and out of the Hellenized nonsense of the Pharisees. What did Jesus Himself believe? The Son of God had a religious outlook that quite obviously does not support the speculative theology of the church leadership after the passing of the Apostle John.
We have more than sufficient documentation for this: The ancient Hebrews were mystical and otherworldly. Not every individual, of course, but the people who took the time to contemplate their God recognized the centrality of a transcendent realm. If they read their own Scriptures, they understood that this world was not what we were designed for. This is not where we started. Something happened that buried our eternal nature in flesh that is at enmity with God.
The ancient Hebrews knew that their nation was called to a mission in this world, everyone dragging around a fallen fleshly nature that must be enslaved to the heart, because the heart was the interface between flesh and spirit. The spirit must take ascendancy over the flesh; the spirit must be awakened to its duty to God.
Jesus was disappointed that Nicodemas didn’t understand the concept of spiritual regeneration. It was part of the Old Testament theology. Paul was disappointed that he had to explain Election (another OT concept), that not every human is born with a spiritual nature, only some of us. But it was the key to understanding the difference between Jacob and Esau. It was the key to understanding the truculence of Pharaoh chasing down Moses and the Nation of Israel after the Ten Plagues.
Even if the bed-ridden Lazarus of His story was only a symbolic figure, Jesus talked about how people under the Covenant of Moses could go to Heaven (“the bosom of Abraham”). What changed at the Cross? If the Covenant of Moses could get people into Heaven, what was the problem that was solved with a new covenant?
Jesus died to end the old covenant with all it’s limitations on who could have peace with God while still living on this earth. He opened the peace of God to all the Gentiles. The issue was always bringing home His sheep to His pasture. The key has always been God’s public reputation, but you need to read “public” as including an audience that is far more than just humans. It’s all of Creation, along with the elohim, cherubim, seraphim, angels, Watchers, Nephilim, etc., and the Devil.
We don’t need a Christology; that was just a response to Judaizers and Gnostics. It was pasted up by Hellenized church leaders who lacked a good Hebrew grounding for dealing with other Hellenized fools. The Hebrew intellectual traditions of mysticism undercut the whole question. We don’t need Substitutionary Atonement (a term nowhere in Scripture). Rather, Jesus died in my place, not to get me into Heaven, but to get me into the Covenant while I’m still alive here on this earth. This life is where I can do the most good for God’s reputation.
Sin was never a condemned criminal standing, but standing outside of peace with God. Adam and Eve didn’t work in the Garden on probation; they were eternal persons in the same kind of body Jesus had after His resurrection. The concept of “innocence” doesn’t apply to eternal people. They didn’t lose their innocence; they were compromised and forced into a mortal body. The mortal flesh is what the Devil offered them, lying about how it would make them like God, deciding for themselves what is good and what is evil. “Here, let me give you a rational mind” — great sales pitch. Choosing to exercise a human intellect meant assuming a mortal form. What they had before was ineffably better.
There’s nothing in Romans 5 about Adam spreading guilt to all his descendants. Adam and Eve chose mortality and the procreation that comes with it. Born in a mortal form is inherently defiling. Babies are born defiled and unacceptable in God’s Presence because they are flesh. As children they find peace with God because they are covered by their parents. At some point, they are obliged to seek their own peace with Him. It has nothing to do with whether or not they are Elect; every human is obliged to seek peace with God. Otherwise, they belong to Satan, born into his realm.
What’s at risk in this world is peace with God — the Covenant — not eternity. Spiritual birth is a symbolic term referring to that moment, that new beginning, when an Elect person becomes aware of their election. At that point, the Devil strives to keep them from discovering how to find peace with God. Without the knowledge of divine revelation, they can find provisional peace by seeking a clear conscience, a proxy for being in the Presence of God. They seek to enslave their fleshly nature to a spiritual purpose. It’s good enough and God honors that.
With the knowledge of the Covenant, the flesh is awakened to fight against what the Covenant requires. That person becomes accountable for the rituals and protocols of coming into God’s Presence. They have to deal with sin as defined by the Covenant protocols for restoring their fellowship with the Father. Without the Covenant knowledge, they aren’t in a position to know those protocols, and so they are not held accountable for them (“sin is not imputed”).
With or without the Covenant, the issue is finding peace with God. People without Election fare much better under a covenant, but there are plenty of blessings for the Elect with no knowledge of any covenant. The non-elect die either way and end up in Hell, so the only difference is how they live in this life.
Meanwhile, the New Covenant wipes away the bulk of the protocols. Jesus displaces all the sacrifices that allowed people to stand in sacred space. We still need to be fully aware of the defiling fleshly nature and how much trouble it causes so that we can nail it to the Cross — a euphemism for breaking its dominance in our decisions. We enslave it and drag it around, following Jesus who had to do the same with His fleshly nature. The difference is that He didn’t have to learn and exercise internal discipline because He was born spiritually dominant over His own flesh. His flesh was on the Cross from the start and never had a chance to defile Him.
Christ’s Law was to love sacrificially as the Father did. Jesus was the living law of His Father. Obeying the Law means obeying Christ, and vice versa. The flesh hates that; it seeks all kinds of exemptions and excuses for failure. If the flesh wins, you are simply acting according to the flesh. Nothing new there. You need to do some makeup work to restore His love/law to your life. Your flesh will feel the burn of guilt, but your spirit knows that’s just a lie. You didn’t commit a heinous crime; you slipped up. There’s no distinction between the desire to get right with Him versus the desire to get right with the person you wronged. If the Spirit wins, you obey Christ.
All I’m doing here is summarizing and restating what the Scripture says for a Hebrew mind. It’s inherently relational, not legal. It’s feudal, not democratic. It’s tribal and familial, not based on citizenship. Speculative formal theology dies when you embrace the Hebrew otherworldly orientation. Jesus was a Hebrew mystic. Are you going to follow Him?
