The image of the evil witch stirring a foul-smelling cauldron and uttering dark curses on a stormy night is entirely Western and entirely absent from Scripture.
The foundation of all things in the Bible is recognizing the moral fabric of Creation. If we embrace Jehovah (by that name or any other name you prefer) as Creator and God Almighty, then it stands to reason His creation would bear the imprint of His moral character. His revelation insists that Creation is a living thing, eagerly desiring His truth be revealed. That “truth,” insofar as anyone could explain it, is His moral character. His Son Jesus Christ was the clearest expression of that truth and character, so our task is to understand Jesus the man.
I warn you that all the Western hagiography and sacerdotal human-centered bullshit about Him and His time in the flesh is not from God. Our only hope to get a clear view of God is to sweep away the entire range of Western Civilization and start back in the ancient Hebrew people fresh from the Wilderness Wandering. Only rarely did they have a better grasp of God’s character and revelation than they did at the start of the Conquest (think about Jericho) and at a few other moments during their history before God handed them over to the Gentiles. We cannot understand Jesus until we understand the vast difference in intellectual assumptions between our world today and His people at their best.
What I share with you is not at all new; I learned it from people far smarter and better educated. I’m just offering a small sample distilled from years of study. I’m just a messenger boy and you don’t have to take my word for it; I invite you to go and see for yourself.
What I saw in that ancient world is that we should realize we have an option to join ourselves with God’s Creation and embrace His moral character, or we can be morally blind and try to figure things out with our pitiful human talents. As you might expect, most of the world, including virtually every part of organized Christianity, has chosen the latter path. Ask any church member if they know much about the sensory heart and how seriously the Hebrew people took the idea that your heart had its own “mind” well above the brain’s intellect. The Bible is loaded with references to the heart as having its own awareness and logical processes, but most Westerners blow it off as figurative language. God gave us a heart-mind because that is the only way we can perceive His character and our place in the moral fabric of Creation. He does not speak to the intellect, so all those miracles and messages of God are impossible without letting your heart rule your mind. You cannot know God with your mind, but your mind can be trained to organize and implement His will by letting the heart rule.
Thus, with a heart primed to lead your consciousness in obedience to His moral character, you are ready to discover where He intends you to be at any given moment. That is, you will “confess” His truth before a watching Creation (which is far bigger than our cosmos). That old word we stole from Latin — “confess” — means to stand alongside someone in a public demonstration of support for whatever they assert and do. To “confess” Christ is to echo His message from our hearts.
When we “confess” the truth of God, Creation itself moves to respond with positive support, including us in its own blessed obedience to His character. That’s what that shalom stuff was all about in the Old Testament. The Covenant of Moses was a specific application of the universal divine justice, binding on that people, in that context, in that land. Needless to say, they abrogated that covenant. How do we know? Because the covenant itself offered explanations of how to reap the blessings and how to provoke the curses inherent in God’s character in Creation.
Even if you failed to drag your resisting flesh into full obedience, there was plenty of room for repentance if you truly wanted to please God. If my heart tells me that some action or statement is consistent with God’s character, I am duty-bound to “confess” that word or action. If my heart tells me that some word or action is contrary to His character, then I must denounce that thing, and thus “confess” the truth of God.
By doing so, it is not my power over these things that matters. I’m only exercising the moral dominion God has given me over my own existence. Rather, I am “confessing” the truth as best I can and making sure Creation knows my stance. In that sense, I can “bless” or “curse” anyone and anything and share in the blessing or curse based on the moral accuracy of my confession. You’ll notice I said nothing about orthodoxy — literally “right thinking.” It’s not a question that the mind can judge, nor can any human mind formulate some mythical “propositional truth” that binds others. It is a matter of my own conscience and convictions before God.
So, for example I warn you today the Yes Communities is accursed. I am so utterly certain of this that I am making a strong effort to sell this mobile home in which I live because God has not put me in a place to move it. So as far as I am concerned, it can stay here or someone else can come and take it away, but my obedience to the truth-leading of my heart is to fulfill my moral obligations with all haste and get myself out of here. This is my confession that God will no longer restrain natural and supernatural harm to this place, in particular as it applies to me. I can’t count how often disasters passed all around us without hitting this place, but those days are gone. In order to avoid falling in the hands of Satan, I have to get out of here.
I can tell other folks that this park is accursed (and any other properties Yes manages), but it’s up to God to convince them. Otherwise, it’s either not true for them or it simply won’t make any difference to them in the first place. The point is not some mysterious power in my words, but the very limited power I have to align myself with God’s truth for me. While it’s possible I am the only person under threat of a curse for staying here, my heart tells me Yes Communities itself is doomed, wholly delivered over to Satan for his dark purposes. All I can do is play messenger boy and pronounce a curse on this place.
I’m not “casting a spell” on anything, just telling the story of my heart.
