Fighting Fate
Fate is a heathen concept.
In some pagan mythologies, particularly those on which the West was built, the universe doesn’t care. Even if we imagine there is a personal entity behind our unpleasant circumstances, it’s an uncaring entity. To our human consciousness, making gods in our human image, we can only imagine gods that have all the human failings. In Western mythology, masculine gods can’t be bothered to care about anything but their own whims. In His revelation, Jehovah is having none of that. We cannot apply our self-image to Him. We are made in His image, but we are flawed from the original design.
The entire situation is perplexing to humans. What men universally reject is that the perplexity itself is our own fault. The reason we are in this fix is because we insist on using reason, and God flatly says it’s not enough. Reason is simply not capable of handling the whole truth. The human intellect is limited, so choosing to force everything down into an intellectual frame of understanding squeezes all the essence of truth out of it. Intellect is not freedom; it is a prison. It’s better than brutish emotion and living by lower instinct, but it’s still not enough.
Faith is eminently unreasonable. Faith says God loves you because He says so; He defines what love means. His love often looks nothing like the love we learn from other humans, but that should teach us not to put that much trust in human capabilities. That includes learning not to trust our own capabilities. We have to trust His assertion that everything He does is in our best interest. We can get on board and get all the best we can have in this life, or we can fight and pretend we have it under our control. Faith does not trust human reasoning even at its best.
Most false accusations made against God and His revelation arise from people who demand an accountability from God, as if He were not actually God. They insist God must enter into their domain of control. Our best answer to them is, “You don’t understand.” We may even suggest they are determined not to understand, because they insist on having God on their terms. If you understand logic, you could call this a category error. The best way to handle someone who insists on debating it with you is to suggest they have the wrong epistemology, and until they accept the biblical epistemology, they can’t possibly understand the biblical message. (This assumes, of course, that you understand it yourself.) They’ll say that’s arrogant, but they are the ones arrogantly rejecting what God set forth as proper human reasoning. That itself is the essence of human fallen nature.
Western reasoning is inherently immoral. It lays down presuppositions that exclude God and His revelation a priori. To enter into a Western rational frame of discussion is to abandon truth before you start.
The area in which we exercise free will is to keep ourselves where God says is our best place. Struggling up out of the bondage of human reason, we find the definition remains intellectually imprecise, plus it’s a moving target. This is proper. As before, human reasoning is the servant, given by God to organize and implement obedience to His divine order. The starting point is that God is God and whatever He wants to do with us is all good and right, by definition. That we may find it unpleasant is immaterial to the whole question. The damnable nonsense of thinking that our comfort and pleasure matters is the biggest problem we have. Our reflex is to think that if God doesn’t care about our comfort, then He doesn’t care about us. That’s a lie from Hell; it will prevent you from taking full advantage of His freedom for you.
When you build on the foundation of complete surrender, only then do you stand in the place of discerning those things God wants you to change. Here’s what is so crazy in Western Christianity: We can teach this concept and everyone buys into the words, but cannot bring themselves to actually apply the concept. They can’t do like David, crawling into the tent he erected over the Ark of the Covenant in his palace courtyard. He crouched at the back, the posture and place of the lowest slave. He confessed being beneath notice. When Job was able to confess that, he stood tall against Satan. In the end, Job said it was fine with him if God wanted him to suffer in this life. Same story with Abraham sacrificing Isaac: The knew God would make it all good one way or another, and it really didn’t matter whether it made sense to them.
Our Western minds insist on confusing heaven and earth. Those two words are symbols in themselves. We are programmed to exclude the notion of a divine realm of existence outside of this universe. Even when we teach ourselves to believe in Heaven and Hell, we cannot seem to program our minds to work through the implications of that belief. That’s the difference between “head knowledge” and “heart knowledge.” Something deep inside our unconscious mental wiring will not allow us to take that path of reasoning. God said He could fix that, but we simply refuse to submit to the procedure. We want it to be something simple and quick like surgery; wake up and it’s pretty much done. God says it’s painful, long and slow, plus you have to put lots of effort into it. Losing that bad programming is what Paul called crucifying our “old man” — symbolized by Adam — and letting God resurrect in our souls His Son, the “new man.”
This is the difference between cheap “fire insurance” religion that comes with the logic of semi-Calvinism, versus the deep Hebrew mysticism that realizes a reborn spirit within us demands a total sea change of the mind itself. Nothing any human can do will change our eternal condition; we cannot breathe life into our own dead spirits. What we can do is allow that living spirit to rule our souls and command the intellect to abdicate its throne. While such language is familiar to most Western Christians, they still end up keeping their intellect on the throne because the entire fabric of the Western Christianity demands we not surrender our intellectual purity of theology for something impossible to define intellectually. We can’t claim no one ever gets there, but that the system itself hampers things. Churches are simply not trying hard enough to be different from the fallen world.
So we come to the point like Abraham when we have to be ready to sacrifice all our hopes and dreams for the future. We can’t bring ourselves to pull out the knife and prepare to cut. We can’t let God have that full control. We can’t imagine God making such a demand, so we simply exclude the right answer before we come to question. You can’t receive your life back as a gift from God until He has it all and we personally despair of any future.
When you can tell yourself reflexively that you deserve a short miserable life, a lingering painful death and eternity in Hell, and truly embrace that with all its implications, only then are you ready to occupy the Promised Land of the soul while still on this earth. That truth has to completely own you, and it’s on you to keep that alive and fresh in your mind.
That’s when you are ready to pick out the things in your life God wants you to fight. That’s when you understand what is messed up from injustice and disorder, and when you stand ready to ask the Father to tell you what He wants you to do about it. That’s when you are in the position to reach out with a healing touch to broken lives, because you won’t be silly enough to try fixing things God doesn’t want you involved in.
Morality requires that you get your head on straight and let God be God.
