Let me offer this Christmas gift to you. There’s not much I can do for people who simply disagree with me, but I carry a heavy burden of care for those who simply do not understand.
Take a broad look at what the Scriptures say regarding peace with God. If I use the term “sinless perfection”, you will likely form an image in your mind that is not at all biblical. Rather, it will be informed by western criminal justice thinking. It would arise from a clinical precision that characterizes western democratic law.
The Bible is feudal and familial. The term translated into English as “blameless” does not carry the clinical precision we commonly assume. The biblical concept is much more fluid, based on the assumption of being in God’s family. Sensible parents will overlook some peccadilloes because children often don’t understand where the boundaries are and certainly don’t understand the consequences of many mistakes.
That’s how God views things with us. The issue is not the particular actions; those are not singled out. Rather, everything turns on whether you genuinely care about Him as a Person. Over and over again: It’s personal. It’s not rule-bound. Americans in particular struggle with this; worldwide we are known for being more hide-bound and nit-picky over the rules, semantics, etc., than any other culture. The biggest NATO joke of all is the sarcastic remark: “as flexible as an American”.
Having worked in American public education, I can tell you that the vast majority of student discipline problems arise from this cultural orientation. When I dealt with kids from other cultures, discipline problems were nearly non-existent, as long as you were accepted into the community. Americans in particular imagine there is a code of behavior that stands between teachers and students, whereas other cultures see a direct connection between the people.
That’s how it worked for the Hebrew culture: There is a direct connection between God and His earthly family. There was no impersonal code of law standing between them. You’ll see this when you examine Leviticus and the ritual code. Law describes the relationship; it does not interfere with it. As long as you genuinely loved the Lord, everything could be worked out one way or another. There was a sacrifice for just about everything.
The only thing that could not be worked out was spite towards God. This is what the phrase “willful rebellion” meant. It was not a matter of what you did in specifics, but your attitude.
Thus, Lucifer’s fall was not a matter of doing things wrong; it was a wholesale rejection of God’s decision about something. Further, the dispute is portrayed in certain terms, a frame of reference that is foreign to American culture in particular, and Western Civilization in general. God consistently portrayed Himself as a nomad sheikh whose whole domain was family, not turf.
Thus, the problem with Lucifer remains a family dispute. A high-ranking family member throws a fit and erects a barrier to fellowship with his Father. It’s a personal dispute. But because of the nature of how God runs His sheikhdom, the dispute is handled in the open so that all the other family members can observe and understand. It affected the whole domain, a rejection of something God wanted for Himself — an expansion of His family in a particular direction. Lucifer rejected the new family members as family.
It’s not a question of whether God was right to build Himself a private garden; that’s simply how any sheikh would do things. The crux of the dispute was making His gardeners part of the Eternal Family instead of making them mortal like the rest of the garden. Lucifer objected, unwilling to treat the gardeners as family. He was insulted by their elevation to his level, so to speak. Their praise and worship went straight to God, and Lucifer felt he deserved to be revered as a higher being so that some of their worship should come to him, not simply pass through him.
God agreed to some kind of test, something we cannot really comprehend. The Hebrew non-canonical writings offer a limited understanding of these things through parables and symbolic explanations.
Lucifer became Satan, determined to destroy these new family folks that God loved. However, his method was undermining the relationship, tempting the new family members to leave the shadow of God’s favor. Thus, it’s not “Original Sin” (as commonly defined) but simply joining the opposing side, a sin that some of the elohim council had already committed. Adam and Eve were not held to some artificial standard of perfection. You can be sure they made mistakes in their management of God’s private garden, and everything was handled the way a sheikh’s family would. The problem is that they left God’s favor.
Again: The Fall in the Garden was not a simple matter of disobedience to some strict word of command. The Fall was choosing sides with Satan. In the ongoing debate between Lucifer and God, Adam and Eve made a choice to join the wrong side. That meant they chose mortality. The resulting dive into mortality for humans makes us living evidence regarding the nature of the dispute. We are born mortal, under the dominion of Satan.
The one thing we can surely understand from all of this is our current mission here as mortals. We must choose God’s side in the dispute; we must give Him glory. We are to protect His reputation as good children would. He calls us out of slavery to the Devil, giving us the power to live on the Devil’s turf as children chosen by the Father. The tension between our mortal flesh and our eternal spirits is all part of the evidence we present in God’s favor.
God is not watching us like a hawk through the lens of some impersonal standard. He sees us through the lens of His Son’s blood sacrifice. Instead of blood that protects the sacred space from our mortality, the blood cleanses us as the living sacred spaces God inhabits. We are the carriers of His Presence in this mortal realm Satan claims as his feudal grant. Yes, God demoted Satan and forced him into a space-time existence, not in Heaven.
Mortality is where the Devil belongs. It’s not so much that God gave him the garden, but that we did as God’s proxies. Satan seeks to desecrate and destroy the natural world because it belonged to us and is where we are meant to live. He hates us. The natural world cries out in this bondage, wherein Satan provokes humans to defile everything. The natural world still responds to divine justice, but obstructs human efforts to live under Satan’s reign. It grows us thorns and thistles until we turn to divine justice. The redeemed Elect are an invasive presence on Satan’s turf because we breathe life back into Creation by walking in justice.
And the Lord’s justice is how we love each other — just as Christ did on the Cross — and pouring compassion on the rest of Creation. His love is the native fertilizer for the growth of all good things. This is how we defeat the Devil.
So terms like “justice” and “justification” and “sanctification” don’t mean what American minds assume they mean. It means we are back to being family members of the Father, doing what He intended in making us. It means we have embraced His love. It’s a matter of loyalty, AKA faith.
