The World versus God

There’s really very little we can do to help this fallen world. All I can do is offer my best moral counsel to those who are members of this Kiln of the Soul parish, who embrace the Radix Fidem covenant.

Hatred is not a sin; it’s a human emotion. The problem is who/what you hate and why. God says there are things He hates, and depending on how you translate the original languages of the Bible, there are people He hates for various reasons. Study those passages and understand His wrath, because it points to His divine character and how He acts. Sin is defined as arguing with God.

Racism is not a sin; it’s human instinct. You should understand that from the Tower of Babel. God intends for us to live in small tribal communities. Only via the Covenant of Christ do we transcend DNA and live in covenant communities. But it remains a moral necessity that we live in small tribal communities where we only have to deal with folks who share that daily life under moral terms we all embrace. Jamming together people with conflicting moral values is a sin of oppression. God’s Law demands that communities with differing moral values and cultural flavors have some space between them.

This is why churches are encouraged to come together strongly in clannish togetherness and put distance between themselves and outsiders. So your urbane club-like church with its corporate structure and a body of folks who merely attend as members is all wrong. It’s not a church as the Bible defines it. A church is a body of folks who live together as a clan, an extended family household in an eastern feudal structure. It’s not necessary to live together inside the same building, but to the degree the conditions permit, live together as a small village in close proximity. Your neighbors should be like cousins with whom you were raised. That’s a command from God.

It is inevitable that different churches in different places are going to develop their own internal cultural habits, customs and traditions. There’s nothing particularly holy and righteous about your clan’s customs and traditions, but if they aren’t important to your identity, something is very wrong with the situation. You need to leave and find a better context, but only if the Spirit leads you that way.

But the whole social milieu must remain feudal and covenantal. Because society as a whole tends to reject all of this, each church must determine how to uphold their uniqueness as a testimony. To outsiders, this will look like racism. There is literally nothing we can do to prove otherwise. Even if our covenant family includes multiple ethnic groups, we cannot escape the false charges of racial hatred.

That’s because the outside world is not a covenant community. It cannot be made into one, either. Valid covenants require feudal authority, and each individual adult must embrace it personally. (Children are included under parental authority until they become adults.) To have any real hope of actually working, each adult must also be spiritually born and heart-led. We have precious little means of actually filtering out those who fail either of those requirements, but there is at least a conscious presumption of those necessities. Plus, we acknowledge that the heart-led part is a matter of ongoing development, a process of discovery that has to start somewhere.

There is no way the world will accept those terms. A fallen nature does not permit bowing the knee to God and His revelation. The only way to deal with racial tension is through the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. It requires the power of heart-led living. That’s because racial tension is just one more facet of fallen nature. The real issue is a lack of trust on any grounds at all, and God’s Word is very strong about the terms of trust and the proper grounds for distrust. And distrust of fallen humans is most certainly not a sin; on the contrary, distrust is a requirement burned into your heart by the Holy Spirit. We don’t even trust ourselves.

The other issue related to racism is exclusion, treating folks differently based on different levels of trust. It’s morally evil to demand everyone trust everyone else on all the same terms. Otherwise police badges, for example, would mean nothing. And it’s just damned stupid to expect the mass of fallen humanity to be conditioned against their own instincts. All you get is a world full of people who aren’t free to discuss their inner thoughts so that no one can possibly get together and work out differences and terms of cooperation. Instead, everything is imposed by evil people who pretend they aren’t evil.

But it’s impossible to explain this to our society. So we don’t bother to explain to their deaf ears and blind eyes; we also don’t hide it. Unless the Lord seizes their consciences, nothing will change. We seek to live by His divine will and let the world go to Hell, because the only alternative is to open up to the world and let them drag you down. Only the Devil will tell you that it’s possible to gain God’s favor and that of the fallen world at the same time.