Revelation is inherently symbolic, non-literal parables.
Do you suppose there might be a reason God’s first revelation to fallen mankind was to assert the truth of The Fall? That’s what that business of the Flaming Sword was about at the entrance to Eden. Whatever it is you imagine Eden might be, you can still get there, but not without passing that Flaming Sword. It deters only those unwilling to forsake this life and embrace the Spirit Realm.
But the initial redemptive outreach of God was His moral law. The biblical narrative seems to assume we really have no use for the specific details of life back then, so it tosses out symbols and characters to establish a narrative matrix on which to hang our limited human grasp of something so very far about us. In essence, God said He would open the way to redemption and restoration, but on His terms as Creator. You have to act as if those wild stories are at least symbolically accurate.
In the New Testament, we learn that you have to come through God’s divine Living Law. Not some written covenant, which can only give some simulacrum of what His Law looks like in certain contexts, but His Son Jesus Christ as the Living Law. Jesus is the Law. When you understand Jesus the Man of men, you understand the revelation all the way back to that Flaming Sword. As my regular readers know, that means you have to know at least something of the Hebrew intellectual and cultural background, because that’s who Jesus was and is. That background was designed by God to reflect how humans are designed to think and operate.
And of course Jesus’ followers were told to study that Covenant of Moses and all the included narrative that is more or less today’s Old Testament. You further have to study it in its own context; you cannot pretend to extract verbal principles that apply universally for the brain’s convenience. You have study them as something that lives and breathes inside of you. You cannot build an intellectual and logical abstraction of divine justice in your head; you must build a moral abstraction in your heart-mind.
In summary, laying hold of God’s grace requires you first pass through His Law. We offer His grace to all around us, but if folks cannot recognize grace, we have to show them the mercy of the Law. We have to let them taste the moral boundaries whether or not they can make sense of them. We have to act in this world according to His divine character, and the Law is as much of His character as the fallen soul can grasp. Indeed, it’s a bit too much, but that’s the whole point. The demands of the Law are the demands of the entire cosmos on human behavior. If people won’t embrace the grace God has given you, then you must handle them according to the Law. Their understanding, or lack of it, is between them and God. We aren’t called to be efficient, but faithful.
All this Westernized bullshit about being “nice Christians” is a perversion, a blasphemous insult to God. You cannot discern God by the prevailing cultural orthodoxy.
In the heat of the moment, you heart knows, even when your mind is lost and dragged along by the heels. It is a good thing to spend time in contemplation every time a feeling arises — anger, fear, sadness, happiness, etc. — to discern its cause. At first you’ll be hesitant as you accept a temporary understanding that changes with more time and exposure to the wisdom of your heart. The mind is a truculent rebellious thing that is loath to learn subjection to the heart. Still, there comes a point when you are confident enough to act and willingly accept the consequences. You can’t hide out in the monastery forever. The whole point is that you take your broken vessel into a world of even more badly broken vessels and splash some truth around. Some of it by intention, but plenty of it will leak out despite your mind’s preoccupations.
Our goal is to make more of our lives a matter of conscious obedience to the moral imperatives in the heart. It’s a lot more fun that way. It means rejecting forcefully every part of Western cultural orthodoxy and building a fresh living understanding of the ancient ways of God’s people. Yes, there are always mitigations due to contextual variations, but your heart always knows what to do to please God. Always.
Revelation is you living by your heart, you as God’s parable among many, to symbolize His call to all that they become yet another parable themselves.
