If you set your heart to know the God’s Justice, it will make you seem to many less diplomatic.
First, I want to offer a note of thanks to all of my subscribers. There’s been a surge in numbers recently. Your interest in my brain spew is a blessing and reaffirms that I am on message and it is significant — whether good or ill is beside the point. I must note I can’t return the favor; that’s a part of how I get things done. My calling pushes me out into what most folks think of as pioneering in the intellectual wilderness. Actually I’m just poking around ancient ruins of forgotten civilizations in terms of intellectual heritage. I really don’t have time and energy left to read a lot of blogs myself. Again, it’s my calling and personality, so don’t take it as an insult. For me to do what I do requires I take a highly unusual path, but I’m only too glad to share.
I have a foot in two worlds. It’s not that I can’t bring myself to leave behind Western Civilization, but that I have to keep speaking to folks caught up in it. If I am entirely alien in how I express myself, I might as well be writing in a foreign tongue. But the longer I stand in this weird place, the more I wish I could just go completely over. That’s the human side of things. In God’s Justice, I know I can’t just abandon the flock that way. I have to lead them to greener pastures and still waters, and protect them from predators.
Consider the case of the Three Hebrew Boys and “Cool in the Furnace” (reference to a children’s song). Am I the only person who is amused that we remember the three fellows by their new Babylonian names, but we know Daniel best by his Hebrew name? Anyway, these guys clung to God’s Laws as best they could in a difficult context and survived to God’s glory. You can too, but you have to have a bit of that Hebrew intellectual approach to things, not just some poor English translation of the covenant code itself. That’s my specialty: translating the underlying moral intelligence into our modern Western world. It’s a major undertaking. I’ll never be done, not least because I’m still dragging my own intellect into that Hebrew mold. My mind was not eager to surrender the throne in the first place, and ever pines to retake it.
With all the stuff I’ve written and published, you have to know I care about people. My heart melts at a very low temperature, but I must warn you that my demeanor does not. The longer I work at pursuing God’s moral character in His revelation, the more stoic my personal presence becomes. I’m not any less of a clown in personality, but less so in how I show it. Indeed, I’ve noticed in answering pesky comments that I tend to be more brusque, but without a sense of false guilt. It comes upon me as a penchant for gut level honesty with injustice.
Those who know me best aren’t much surprised, but some of you may begin to wonder just what sort of man I am. I’ll have to let you decide for yourself, since even I can’t really answer that. As one blogger says, “I won’t tell you about myself; I’ll let someone else get that wrong.” The problem I face is our Western nicey-nicey culture, which is frankly at odds with the whip-cracking Jesus did in the Court of Gentiles. As long as you fail to see how utterly natural that was for Him, you won’t understand the Hebrew image of shepherd manhood. I’m not going to pretend I’m following Jesus more closely than you or anyone else, but the longer I work at it, the more painfully obvious it is to me that Westerners don’t get it.
It would be equally deceptive to envision me as a Western version of “a man’s man.” I’m not that at all, any more than I am a neutered metrosexual. Some might mistake me for that brutish ogre kind of guy, simply because I’m now much more willing to show a bit of impatience with silly women, for instance. But I am the same with silly men, too. If I can discern the gender of the one I address or answer, I will most certainly tune my answer according to what God’s Word says about each. In general, men should know better when it comes to moral questions, but it’s much more complex than that. Either way, try not to be shocked if you happen to see something that seems less than diplomatic in my response to some comments here. I can only write one of the many possible answers that come out of quantum moral reasoning.
God’s justice includes mercy and love, but not as typically defined in our Western culture.
