Holding the Door Open

Eden is a long way from Utopia.

The latter will ever remain a myth, a materialistic fantasy. It’s a demand that God mend His ways to match human reason. Eden represents what God designed for us, what He designed us for. So long as reason rules human aspirations, we will never approach Eden. Human reason cannot possibly desire to face that Flaming Sword of revelation. Human reason cannot bow the knee to God unless some other faculty awakens to overpower reason. Reason on the throne of human will is what keeps us under Satan’s authority, precisely because we imagine that we are free.

You may know that I generally hate videos. Some of it is entirely personal, but there is a broad background of factual evidence that the medium itself is a serious danger to our conscious awareness. On the one hand, it offers proof just how weak and vulnerable is human reasoning. You can’t trust your mind to remain faithful to the truth because it is not designed to handle the truth. On the other hand, if you strive to remain connected to the higher moral awareness of your heart, there is no doubt you’ll be better armed to handle the manipulative nature of most video presentations. But don’t fool yourself; just because you claim to be heart-led doesn’t mean you can watch all the videos your addictive flesh wants to see. If you are heart-led, you’ll be careful to avoid most of them in the first place. And the ones you do watch will be heavily filtered through a powerful moral awareness.

So yesterday I saw one that I knew was a lot of propaganda, but was struck by something portrayed that was morally proper. How factual the portrayal might be was not the issue. Sometimes the facts simply do not matter. What matters is that Kadyrov knows the moral truth on one issue in particular — forgiveness. He welcomed home a bunch of stray sheep who went off to join Daesh and found out what a huge fat lie it is. While these men did pay their penalties, there was a place for them to return to their homes and rebuild a life in Kadyrov’s domain. In the video, it was plain to see his brand of forgiveness was strength, not weakness. He put people first because such is the core of his earthly treasure.

Westerners assign way too much value to “principle” — making a god of some imaginary “objective truth.” Absolute truth is moral in nature, far beyond intellectual packaging. Ultimate truth is the Person of God. If you cannot imagine our Creator as someone who can change His mind, then you make Him a dead deity. He tells us flatly to call on Him and seek to persuade Him. Granted, a great deal of that process is aimed at changing us to His way of seeing things, but God is not steel and concrete. He lives and hears and considers what is in our hearts. Knowing God bears little resemblance to a memorized body of factual knowledge.

That you might be able to find alleged ethical violations in Kadyrov’s rule over Chechnya is mostly missing the point. All that really means is that someone refuses to understand how reality works. Don’t imagine that I idolize Kadyrov in any way. I’m not a Muslim, for example. If I admired Islam that much I’d be one of them. But Islam isn’t nearly as much a problem for me as it is for most Westerners. Nor is any other religion, or having no religion at all. I don’t stand on rational principle, but upon my best grasp of the moral ground of God’s Person while having to tolerate the sloshing sewage of fallen human existence. I recognize that I cannot take seriously whatever my intellect and reason might imagine is the ideal.

But my heart knows a scent of Eden’s flowers when it wafts on the breeze.