Divine justice is not simply the wrath of God falling on sin and sinners. Rather, it is the provision of redemption through covenant boundaries. The Lord revealed Himself — His moral character — through His covenants and His actions within those covenants. The boundaries reflect the very nature of reality itself, because His personality and character are inherent in His Creation. The way Creation works reflects Him. The covenants are a guide to discerning His character as manifested in reality.
Thus, divine justice is not merely retribution, but is restorative. It brings us back into His mercy and provision for fallen humanity. His revelation teaches us about our situation here and how to orient our thinking about what really matters.
We should already understand that only His Elect can receive the Holy Spirit. Without the Presence of the Holy Spirit, it is impossible to understand His revelation of His character. Thus, it requires the Holy Spirit to discern how you should think and act in context so that you manifest His glory. We are taking sides with Him in the heavenly debate on His Divine Council about things we cannot really comprehend.
That’s what we were made for in the first place. We worship Him and obey Him as our feudal Master and Lord. The act of baptism and other rituals are demonstrative protocols symbolizing our loyalty to Him.
We do all of this knowing that the majority of those around us are likely to be non-elect. His revelation gives us provisional indicators we can use to estimate whom we should treat as part of the divine family of Christ, but there is no certainty available on a human level of understanding. For the most part, we must build a lifestyle that leaves the ultimate question open as to who is Elect and who is Damned. The issue is not for us to attempt to nail it down, but to trust the Lord and His guidance about how to act with other humans.
Jesus warned that it is impossible to weed out the Damned from our community of faith (see the Parable of Tares). Instead, we are to operate in a certain way that gives them room to prosper until the harvest of souls. It is the glory of God that we toil away at keeping a community prospering in faith so that the fakes expose themselves and depart on their own. We are trying to make it very hard for them to tolerate our company.
In the process, we challenge the Elect to rise in faith and submission to Christ, while encouraging the Damned to move on. The goal is not a state to be achieved, but a process to be maintained. We must understand from the start that this is a dynamic situation, ever changing, responding in faith to changes in the context. We are building a community as a living thing.
A part of this process is understanding that we will never nail down who is Elect and who is Damned. Rather, it works out in practice to discerning how to keep shalom working as His glory. We maintain a cynicism, a skepticism about ourselves. We don’t trust our own flesh, but are obliged to drag it around and make it do the work. It becomes a matter of keeping an eye on the eternal goal of our human existence, but struggling with a fleshly nature that will never fully surrender to that divine purpose. The best we can do is learn to tolerate our own weaknesses and those of others, Elect and Damned.
No two communities will be the same. Uniformity as humans imagine it is not a part of the picture. Rather, it is a host of living communities expressing traits that arise from and match the local context. Further, that context includes the members themselves. Always imperfect, yet seeking to be more perfect, we maintain a community ever in tension. The best we can do is discover the limits of toleration within individual selves and the community as a whole. Who leads and how they lead will indicate who needs to go and who needs to stay — and when — along with how to pass through the days in shalom and glory.
At some point, the tension must break from time to time. Someone will become intolerable in the context and must be excluded. The details must be worked out within the context.
Throughout this process, we should be ever mindful that the Damned are damned. We cannot remake them into Elect. The most we can do is build an atmosphere that calls the Elect to rise and the Damned to feel unwelcome. Worst of all is that the New Covenant in Christ wipes away the linkage between society/government at large and the covenant community. There is a clear gap between the secular life and the community of faith. We are obliged to withdraw from the world at large in some measure, however the Spirit leads in the context.
We don’t hate the Damned; we pity them. They have no hope! The most we can do for them is to manifest what they cannot have. The more faithful we are, the weaker they will appear in our community. It’s not the question of identifying them officially as Elect or Damned, but identifying whether they are people who belong in the covenant community. If the answer is exclusion, then we must treat them as Damned, as outsiders who could never even understand. How sad for them! We must turn them over to the Devil; we must withdraw the spiritual covering. They will become wide open to whatever God decrees in His wrath against sin.
The blessings of covenant covering cannot extend to people who act like the Damned. Yes, weep for the losses of the fleshly nature, the sorrow of disentangling from them emotionally and physically. It hurts. We are losing an investment of our souls in the lives of others. But don’t surrender to the anger of your flesh, trying to claw back that investment, as if it were some material accounting process. We are not the instruments of wrath, though we are the instruments of exclusion.
This has nothing to do with the obscene calculus of the world and its ways. We should expect the world to reject the whole process of spiritual reckoning. We should expect worldly society and government to interfere in various ways. The world does not recognize the mission of the covenant community, and will seek every opportunity to assert its own system of control in every process it notices. This is why we are obliged to withdraw as far as possible as a community of faith.
But you should hardly be surprised that, in our American culture, we see a vast degree of compromise in organized religion. It is the long result of centuries of compromise that began back before Constantine. Today, churches seldom bear any resemblance to a covenant community. They should be treated as secular organizations that just barely permit some limited spiritual fellowship. The Lord can use us to influence some individuals there, but don’t expect churches to do anything to seriously alienate the Damned; they often run the show.
Pity the churches that are so spiritually destitute. Pity the Damned. Do what you can to keep them out of your hair, but they will never go away until the Lord returns.
