EH&D 6

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams. Regular readers will recognize this as a rewrite of a previous post.)

Leverage

I mentioned previously the concept of recognizing the authority of others over us in varying degrees. The same concept applies to us in living out our own life narratives. We have to replace the shadows of Western mythology about authority with something more consistent with how we are actually wired.

Revelation teaches us that changing human behavior requires leverage. Any leverage we might have comes from God alone. God may permit humans to chase a lot of different approaches for gaining leverage, but His moral character restricts His servants to voluntary leverage that depends on His Spirit. It’s a question of dominion and boundaries authorized by God. If someone voluntarily enters your domain, you have only so much leverage as they surrender. We bear the burden of negotiating leverage and boundaries.

There are thresholds in the Spirit Realm not easily discerned by flesh. We are warned to keep in our mental awareness that there may come a time when we will be forced to defend our boundaries. There are no simple rules; this is one of the most difficult areas for the mind to grasp in God’s moral character.

What is not difficult to grasp is that the vast majority of what humans do stands in stark violation of God’s moral justice. If you follow any logic except that of the Spirit Realm, you cannot fail to offend God’s moral character. It’s not so much the particulars as the failure to consider the authority of revelation in the first place. If we embrace His revelation, the Spirit of God fills up the things we lack, and heals our injustice.

There remains for us a state of tension in this world. On one level we are to maintain a fierce loyalty to our Lord in all things, even as we recognize we have precious little moral leverage in a fallen world. We trust Him for the difference and seek what few opportunities we have to bring Him glory.

The Western obsession with “teaching them a lesson” is rooted in evil. The flesh imagines that it has leverage and can compel some “proper” behavior, even to the point of compelling “proper” thinking. That’s a demonic mythology. Your children are under your dominion by virtue of birth, a dominion steadily decreasing as they age; the rest of the world is on its own before God. Your only real authority from God is exclusion of those who refuse to cooperate with His calling and mission in your life.

How you exercise that mandate of exclusion is always subject to the vagaries of context. Your actual power to exclude may be highly constrained. You cannot demand that fallen souls understand your calling from God. There is a sense in which you cannot expect fallen souls to understand anything that matters. If you have a talent for explaining, use it. Pray and strive to have some kind of answer. Otherwise, be prepared to remain silent as a lamb before its shearers. The only people who can really understand much at all are those to whom God has granted some measure of enlightenment. You can speak only to what little they may have.

Nor are you required to succeed at every defense of your dominion. Rather, it is the attempt, the determination to please God, that matters most. It remains in His hands to enable any measure of success. Sometimes you know you have to grab the whip, as Jesus did in the Temple. Sometimes you seize your own Cross. The ultimate victory is leaving this life, not controlling events within it.