Mankind Is Fallen

Perhaps it seems a bit odd I should have to use a title restating a pretty basic Christian doctrine.
By no means am I trying to address those who might actually dispute the assertion. I expect that from the fallen world. People who are fallen would prefer to deny the very thought. Christians who join them in this assertion are not Christians in the sense we need to take them seriously at all. Their claim to faith is false, and we have plenty of them. What drives me here is how most Christians who claim to believe this doctrinal assertion still live as though it were false.
If the church looks like the world, what’s the point?
The message of God is whatever God said it was. It is not subject to revision and updating according to human fashion. The only reason we don’t die upon spiritual birth is because the Lord said He wants to use us to promote His glory. Where we get into trouble is when we attempt to summarize or characterize that message of glory. Nobody has to tell me I’m out of step with the mainstream. I’m not going to engage in debate and offer proof. I’m a prophet and I will simply present my claim. If it doesn’t call your name, it’s not my problem. God’s truth cuts its own path in the hearts of men.
Again, humanity is fallen. The world itself isn’t fallen, but was delivered to the management of humans and they botched it. We didn’t stay on the path God laid out for us, so things are broken. The first dispute I have with mainstream Christianity is the assumption this world is going to be fixed up. It is not. The reality you and I experience will remain broken until it is replaced entirely. 2 Peter 3:10 comes as close to a blunt statement as we can get on this point. This whole reality is doomed because we messed it up and God does not intend to repair it, but to replace it entirely, down to the level of matter itself.
Whatever the mission of the church is, it cannot include the notion of fixing this world’s problems. We are focused on what follows this current reality. That’s what the resurrection proves, that there is something outside this existence, something superior and more powerful, and we should want that. Granted, Paul warns it is not possible to want it without God awakening our dead spirits first, but that’s another point of conflict. The churches keep insisting there is something humans can do to bring about spiritual birth, and it’s closely tied to the instinctive belief this world can be fixed. Those things are not in our hands; they are not the mission of the church.
We are here to serve those whom God touches and calls into His Kingdom. The election is totally His; the mission of helping them live out the implication is ours. Jesus said He would use us in that way to get His message across. It is not our place to question the efficiency of this plan or the justice in God’s election of some and not others. Those things are stated in Scripture as truths to which we have to adjust our behavior. We aren’t in on the conference in the Judge’s chambers in Heaven when He discusses His divine law and His plans for humanity and His creation. Our mission is much more limited.
God created all there is. We are accountable to Him. How He goes about that is not our business, except insofar as He bothers to tell us what we need to know to serve. We all serve Him; He is Lord and Master and has the power to do whatever suits His whims. “Every knee shall bow” comes with a certain background of assumptions. We aren’t in His position so we can’t argue. Our feeble sense of justice does not apply to Him; He does not subject Himself to us. We are subject to Him. He has revealed to us a portion of His sense of justice; we have rejected that. Seriously, folks, by embracing Western epistemology, we have rejected His revelation. If you can’t be bothered to learn the Ancient Hebrew view of reality and truth, you can’t expect to understand His revelation. Being fallen is hindrance enough to understanding God’s Word; rejecting the fundamental intellectual basis God chose for His revelation guarantees you’ll fail. The entire range of Western logic is broken and alien to Scripture. The sense of justice that comes in the package with Western reasoning is all wrong, and cripples our ability to understand and embrace His truth.
The only reason He keeps us here once He has granted enlightenment and spiritual birth is because He has determined to glorify His name before He ends it all. He has determined certain things must happen in a particular sequence in this time and space continuum. We don’t belong here, and critical to what He wants from us is demonstrating that we don’t belong here.
We who follow Jesus do good things. We don’t do them simply because people need them. We do them because it reveals His glory. The entire logic of how we go about planning those good things is broken because churches invariably operate from a broken human logic. Nothing in what we do should represent the notion of solving problems. Let me say that again: Solving human problems is not our mission. How do you think we are going to suffer for the gospel message if we do everything in our power to fix the suffering? God says He has no plans to fix things. Why are we devoting so much energy to fixing this world’s ills? That is not God’s agenda. Making some pitiful effort to helping someone next to you is a means, not an end. We do good things because they are one of the many ways we draw attention to God’s Heaven.
We are not responsible to God for solving any problems at all; He does not hold us accountable for that. He holds us accountable for His glory. He said repeatedly we would fail on this earth. Even after we lay claim to the full range of powers from the Holy Spirit, we would continue to fail. It’s built into our fallen nature, the flesh we still have to drag around that holds us in this fallen realm of existence. His redemption of life does empower and improve our performance, but performance was never the issue. This fixation on human accomplishment is what damns the churches. The focus is not in this realm of existence. We are seeking to kill this human flesh, to deny it’s hopes and dreams for this world. The entire range of our connection to this world is what we try to nail to the Cross, and struggle to keep it nailed there. It is the fallen Adam who wants to fix the damage on his own terms, as if he could undo the Fall and get back into the Garden. The Garden is gone! It is not coming back to this universe.
Don’t mistake the methods and means for the mission. The mission is revelation of His glory, not making people’s lives better. Making life better is just a means.
The second problem is we struggle mightily against His plans for making life better. We have embraced not only the ultimate goal of fallen men, but we have embraced their methods. Those methods are wholly contrary to the Word of God. Virtually the entire range of church activity is hostile to His revealed method and means. We keep turning to fallen mankind for our instructions on this issue, ignoring that their instructions are based on a false hope of taking over as gods of this universe. I don’t know of a single religious organization in existence on this earth that promotes God’s ways of doing what little can be done to fix things up. We have rejected the mission and the means, and we insist on methods devised by men hostile to the message of Christ.
Correcting this secondary mistake is the purpose of my writing about God’s Laws. That’s not the message here. The message here is that the churches seem to have no clue of the basic “why” of things, so they can’t possibly do the right things.
Stop organizing around perceived human need. Stop planning to grow a church organization with more members and a bigger budget and facility. Those are human goals, totally missing the point. God may grant those things, but they should never be codified in written planning unless it is first acknowledged they don’t really matter. Engineers and planners are not the church hierarchy, and certainly not the spiritual leadership. Their vision is practical answers, but deciding what needs to be engineered is a wholly different level of operation. No one should be seriously frustrated if they find the organization has planned things that don’t happen. All our human aims are mere estimates of where we are at the moment. Investing deep emotional energy into the mere facts of our human existence and instrumentality is blasphemous.
Do you suppose it was for nothing God called Abraham to the life of a tent-dwelling nomad? There were plenty of ancient palaces and temples, but God’s primary representative on earth was a nomad. Do you suppose it was some kind of accident of history that God had Israel living in tents for such a long time? Does it occur to you that investing much of anything into human facilities is all wrong? Centralizing into one huge organization is an abomination in the first place. We should have gotten that message at the Tower of Babel. There shouldn’t be a single congregation on this earth any larger than a couple hundred members. I don’t pretend to know the threshold; that’s an engineering question for experts in behavioral science, but concentrations of wealth and human talent are not what God had in mind. People love that grand vision of greatness as humans measure it, but God calls it an evil obsession. The human organization and facilities are not the Kingdom of God. While I can convince plenty of organizations to put that in writing, it seems no one can persuade them to live accordingly.
Churches were meant to live as tribal communities scattered across the face of the earth. Each was meant to be deeply involved in the locale where the people came together for the purpose of His glory here on earth. They do quite simply what they can, with the resources they gain from whatever it is God calls them to do. Use what you have, not what you imagine you can get for something a fallen man tells you is essential. If the world takes us seriously on its own terms, we are in deep trouble. Dying on the Cross was not a human success; see John 15:18f.
The Hebrew model of life is God’s model for the churches. The church leadership was meant to be two kinds: organizational and ritual. The pastor is not an organizational leader but a ritual leader. There should be ruling elders who operate like Ancient Hebrew clan elders. The idea is not to whip the organization into shape, but to simply come together in seeking to conquer the flesh. We plan for the power of the Holy Spirit to shine through; we make room for that, even as we fully expect the bulk of activity will ignore Him even in the church. Conquering the fallen flesh nature does not happen by the disciplines of the flesh. The church is meant to be an on-going crisis in itself, always in some state of flux because the included humans are always facing new problems. The church victorious does not look like a human army marching over the corpses of their enemy, unless you understand those corpses should be our own, for we are our own enemies. We should pay scant attention to human problems as anything more than a background against which we seek to die.
Death is our goal. It can come as a penalty, and while we can’t possibly understand how, dying without first killing off some measure of our flesh puts us before God somewhat empty-handed. It means we didn’t get the job done; we died for the wrong reason. Otherwise, we seek to earn our exit from this realm. We cannot possibly earn our entrance into His Presence, but we do earn our share of His glory. We earn it not by accomplishments, but by killing the flesh and accomplishments. We earn it by learning to discount the elements of our human existence as having any great importance. We die slowly, bit by bit, working our way out of human concerns. That’s why we can be generous and giving, suffering with others who don’t understand so well — we don’t worry about clinging to things they seem to want and need. We can’t hope to comprehend in the flesh the balance between doing too little and too much for any one person’s needs, so we rely on the Holy Spirit to help us in the moment to know what He wants us to do.
I can’t feed every hungry child, so I let God tell me which children I shall feed, and He gets to choose who I will not feed. The ones who go hungry are His problem. Human suffering we understand, and we commiserate, but we don’t get wrapped up in it. Don’t let the needy person decide what you must do for them. Their suffering is not a guide to our work; His moral justice is and virtually no one in Western Christianity has a clue what that is. Don’t let your own human inclinations and wisdom rule whom and how you help. Let the Lord guide your choices as the instrumentality of His glory. For all the people Jesus fed by miracles, there were thousands more who continued going hungry.
The final issue is our vast ocean of hostility to operating in the Spirit. We have so deeply and thoroughly defined “spiritual” as cerebral that there is little hope for many to ever operate spiritually. That’s a part of our hostility to Hebrew mysticism, a mysticism God Himself built on earth as the means to understanding His revelation.
Yes, we are fallen, and our vast ocean of bad religion is not making anything better.