Dear Readers: Yes, I’m full of it. And today I’m just brimming with prophetic fire. I keep seeing stuff which provokes my spirit. So while I apologize for the excessive posting, I cannot apologize for obeying the imperatives of the Spirit Realm. What follows is something I’ll be posting permanently later today, but here’s the preview. It’s an intellectual ambush on political activism:
Activism and the Kingdom of Heaven
Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15 NKJV)
There can be no excuse for modern translations which change “rightly dividing” into “accurately handling”. Paul is a Hebrew man giving us a parable, and his use of Greek is no excuse for ignoring the underlying Hebrew form of communication. The image is a butcher who trims off the fat and offers a lean cut of meat.
The Old Testament was “the word of truth” in Paul’s day, not as taught by Jews and their man-made Hellenized Talmud, but as Jesus taught it and as it was in ancient times. It is the truth of God clothed in Hebrew culture, history and intellectual assumptions. Cutting off the fat does not mean ignoring all that and reading the Bible from our modern Western assumptions. That would be cutting off the meat and fat and saving only the gristle. Not much nutrition there. For the most part, Western Christianity is pretty ragged and starved because it attempts to abstract entirely too much, and loses everything of value.
The first and biggest mistake Western Christians make is embracing Aristotle and the Enlightenment, and ignoring — sometimes even attacking — the Hebrew intellectual approach to the Bible. Without the least apology, I assert with the Bible reality consists of Two Realms, the Fallen Realm of the Flesh, and the Eternal Realm of the Spirit. The latter is utterly and eternally beyond human intellect. It can be understood only in the reborn spirit of those God brings to life. The mind can learn to obey the executive decisions of the Spirit, and learn to implement divine imperatives, but it cannot hope to grasp them, and certainly cannot evaluate them. Western Christianity sometimes manages to pay lip service to this understanding, but seldom actually operates by it.
This gives rise to a vast ocean of false understanding, resulting in false conduct. In particular, virtually the entire Western Christian establishment is politically active in one flavor or another, all of which they claim is a result of Christ’s teachings, which claim is bordering on blasphemy. I would never suggest God no has interest in human politics, but His interest is clearly stated in Scripture, only to be perverted by those who approach the Bible from false assumptions.
Thus saith the Lord: If your politics don’t reflect what’s written in His Law Covenants, your politics are damned. When rightly dividing His Word in the Old Testament, you cannot possibly understand His Laws until you understand the unspoken prerequisite: a tribal social structure and tribal patriarchal politics. Not as you imagine them to be through the lens of very bad fiction, but in the reality of life as exhibited by folks like Abraham, the Patriarchs, Moses and King David. Each of these men had flaws, and the Bible wastes no time in telling us what they were. Holding Ancient Near Eastern feudal patriarchal values was not a sin. That was righteousness.
So when you see sin around you and you feel compelled in your spirit to speak out against that sin, make sure you first are seeking to build righteousness, not some fresh error. Nothing about the modern secular state pleases God. The very notion itself is from Satan. If your activism takes shape within the presumption of preserving that system, you are an activist for Hell. God’s politics are tribal.
Want to march and wave banners? Start with the one change absolutely necessary for building a godly political system. Clamor for tribal social structures, and for government which respects the demand God made for elders to rule their own extended family households even up to matters of capital punishment. Place the weight of responsibility on clan and tribe. If you aren’t promoting that ANE feudalism, you can’t do any righteousness in your political activism. Everything else is openly contrary to God’s Laws, the teachings of Christ and that of the Apostles.
