Over the past few weeks I’ve tried to establish in our minds a fundamental truth: What happens in this world really doesn’t matter in the ultimate sense. What matters is our commitment. Your heart-led conviction will lead to specific choices and actions, but those things matter only as indicators of your commitment.
This is why we don’t have to come up with the same answers. This is why we can relax and let our brothers and sisters carry on with their lives in contradiction to our own preferences. In the end, it really doesn’t matter what we think or do; what matters is the heart of conviction. If we can see through the actions and apparent thoughts to the heart of commitment and faith, then we can set aside human differences.
When I share with you some of my ideas about how things could be better in this world, I hope you see the faith behind it, that your heart will assess the conviction behind it and guide your mind to understand what really counts for Christ’s glory. It may well be you would respect my opinion on something, but nobody is holding you accountable for echoing my thoughts — I sure don’t. There’s nothing wrong with bantering back and forth on a worldly level as the means to indicating something about our individual callings.
I’m not sure I can so easily slice and dice in neat packages between heart-led moral wisdom and seasoned social science. On the bottom line, until all human government bows the knee to the Covenant of Noah as the entry point to divine justice, nothing we see really matters in human politics. On the other hand, we could see ways to make things a little better within the context of what we now have. In terms of making things a little better, we should have differing ideas. No two of us will see the same problems, nor see those problems in the same light.
I can tell you that the US government has sinned greatly by poking around in the business of other governments. That’s a simple and direct violation of Biblical Law. The warfare in Syria is largely our fault in the first place; the revolt and the rise of ISIS was the result of our meddling via CIA spies and provocateurs, working alongside Mossad and a few others.
Giving aid to the Kurds in itself is not a problem; as a nation of distinct people they do not warrant the oppression of having their homeland partitioned between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. But that was something done to them long ago, so there is no simple answer. Still, there’s no harm in helping them. The problem comes in how we do not champion their independence, but manipulate and use them to make everything worse. Thus, our presence among them, particularly in Syria, is inexcusable.
I don’t have space to discuss Turkey in depth, but they are currently so very far from right that it doesn’t matter what they do, it’s almost all evil. Russia has been pretty much on the right side of things in Syria, in contrast to most other participants. Iran is there by invitation, as well. It’s nobody else’s business. Israel is even worse than Turkey; she has done nothing right. And so on…
All of that is partly a matter of Biblical Law and partly just my opinion. Your heart can tell the difference; I don’t need to justify myself in your eyes. You can discern what I’m trying to do here: pointing back to Biblical Law in contrast to the hopelessness of human striving for things nobody should have. Is there some hope that biblical wisdom can help make things a little bit better for human existence on this planet? No. They aren’t going to listen to God; nothing I say will provoke more than a tiny handful of folks to prayerful consideration of what is just in God’s eyes.
But I can’t simply say nothing at all. There has to be a prophetic warning to people to satisfy the duty to calling and mission. That’s what God’s people do. Whether with words like mine or through some other form of personal devotion to calling, we have to point out sin as sin. That tiny handful who will respond are the ones I care most about; they are the ones who justify my efforts to share what’s in my heart. I can’t do much to help anyone else, but I shall not neglect those the Lord has granted into my shepherd’s care.
