Privileges, Not Rights

Whenever I write about Divine Election, I always get questions. The majority of the time, they are questions asked from an American point of view, with all the bogus nonsense about human rights, etc. The ancient Hebrews never thought in terms of rights, nor did God ever talk about them.

It would be easy to get lost in a host of Bible passages that appear to address the idea that anyone who decides to follow Jesus can find redemption. Way too many people read those passages in the English language with a legalistic eye. We’ve been over that a thousand times. If you are going to debate like a Pharisee, I really don’t need to answer you. Unlike the situation in Jesus’ day, today’s Churchian Pharisees have no legal authority over me. I can answer if I feel moved, but I will start with a rejection of legalism.

In His ineffable wisdom, the Father decided He wanted a garden attached to His divine courts. He chose to make a creature specifically designed to be His gardeners. These people were shaped to project His character onto the garden and compel it to conform; we are His imagers. They were eternal creatures, though not like the rest of His divine staff. Still, He wanted His staff to honor these people in certain ways. It provoked a revolt in portions of His staff.

We could hardly understand much more than that from where we are today, but we are permitted glimpses here and there. The point is that in our position right now, we aren’t really that important. We will be eventually, once we are restored to the Eternal Garden, but as mortals we aren’t that significant. Thus, in the process of setting things up they way they are now, it made sense to God that some humans were eternal creatures in a mortal envelope, while there were also a large number of empty envelopes running around. It’s part of the situation in which God shows His righteousness and glory over the opposition on His staff.

There is no explanation for this that we can comprehend. We simply must accept it. We aren’t supposed to worry about the empty souls around us. As previously explained, we can treat them with the same compassion as we do other mortal creatures with which God populated our world. Indeed, it’s our default approach to everyone until someone starts responding like they have an eternal spirit somewhere inside.

When Jesus opened the doors of the Covenant to all mankind, He raised one caveat: We must take up our own crosses to follow Him. It’s tantamount to a death sentence on our fleshly natures. We must regard our mortal envelopes as justly deserving death as soon on as it suits God. Since it is doomed, we strive to pay no attention to what the flesh wants in any situation.

If the fleshly nature is all you have, you won’t be able to make that choice. You won’t even be able to understand it. However, you may have sufficient good sense to somehow believe in Jesus, at least on a surface level. You may arrive at that place through intellect, emotions, etc. It looks good to you, so you take it. But without a spirit, you’ll struggle to make sense of some parts of it. You’ll do quite well with what looks like a law code and commitment to an ideal.

But the Elect with their eternal awareness should be able to recognize these folks who believe the message as they understand it, but lack the power of the Holy Spirit. You make a place for them because you never know when they might awaken spiritually. Meanwhile, you shouldn’t allow them to take substantial leadership of the covenant faith community.

Unfortunately, over the past two millennia, those fleshly believers have seized control and created a broad system of professional leadership in the flesh, but are simply unable to make spiritual development mandatory. They don’t even understand it, using the words to mean something largely cerebral in nature. Thus, we have the situation we see today in the mainstream religious organizations. The whole concept of the Covenant has become a bit of a mystery, and is treated like an unpopular option at the religion buffet.

If you feel led to attend a regular church, you’ll need to humor the leadership in their dire confusion about how it’s all supposed to work.

Can the fleshly people find peace with God? Not really. They absorb the blessings of that peace by hanging out with covenant folk. They can live under the covering of Christ’s shalom and offer a useful level of allegiance to the Elect leadership. But they are allies, not family. Still, we don’t get to inspect anyone’s spirit, so we have only various clues and the power of conviction to decide who we should treat as divine family versus those we regard as something else — allies, machinery, background, or enemies.

Thus, it’s not a question of what they really are — we cannot know — but what role they play in any given context. Plenty of Elect will fail to rise to the privileges of covenant family. By the same token, a handful of fleshly creatures may hang out with a genuine covenant family.

The concept of fairness has no place in these things. That’s an artificial ideal unique to the West. God has always played favorites (Exodus 33:19). Every ruler across the entire ANE was expected to do the same, as was the same with everyone who filled the shepherd’s role on any level. The only reason the question of something we take as fairness shows up at all in Scripture is because the authority figure may tend to favor someone God doesn’t like so much. No one was condemned for playing favorites, just for favoring the wrong person.

God gets to decide who is His family and who isn’t. He’s not telling us about other people, but He certainly tells us individually when we are family. Isn’t it such a huge privilege to be included? we are awestruck by His mercy and grace on us.