(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams. This is the final chapter.)
The Mission
When your expectations are consistent with God’s intentions, your hopes and dreams will rest in His glory.
A stated purpose behind the Covenant of Moses was bringing revelation to the rest of the world. God chose one nation and granted them an accurate edition of Scripture narrative up to that point, expressed within the context of their time and place. They had a mission to live in such a way that would draw attention to the glory of God. All the promises were conditioned upon faithful obedience to the Law. It didn’t take them long to forget that mission, to twist it into some obscene privilege over all the rest of humanity. Instead of compassion for the nations, they despised Gentiles. They obscured His glory by trying to consume it upon themselves. They were pointedly hostile to that mission by the time Jesus came to offer them one last chance to get back on course.
We can use the language of living for God’s glory, but that lends itself too easily to a pervasive mythology still engulfing us today. Rather, let us carefully define that mission of seeking to increase His glory as largely answered by obeying the moral character revealed in His Law Covenants. Let us then filter our understanding of those covenants through the teachings of His Son.
Doing so will almost surely require that we consciously disassociate with mainstream organized Christianity. Need I state it bluntly? Early Christianity was by the Second Century largely hijacked by Judaizers, those Jewish rabbis determined to bring Christians back into slavery to the Hellenized Jewish political religion. The Pharisaism of Jesus’ day is the essence of what Judaism is today. Zionism is little more than a secularized expression of all that. Particularly in the West, almost the whole of organized Christian religion remains captive to this political agenda through various different threads of belief. Those who claim to reject it nonetheless use exactly the same political and social formulas as the Zionists, playing into their hands.
Simply breaking away from the more overt Zionist influences is not enough. We have to go a lot farther, back to Jesus and His revival of Hebrew mysticism. It is that ancient intellectual approach that informed His teachings, and almost all of it was a restoration of what the Laws of God were supposed to mean. If we keep reading our Western context back into the Bible, we cannot hope to break free and actually follow Jesus. To the degree we retain a Western orientation, so much are we actually anti-Christian.
Correcting this is a tall order. Even if you read all the other books I’ve written and chased down all the material to which they refer, you could still miss something critical. Worse, we remain stuck in this hellish nightmare world of deception.
We cannot simply blame Jews or Judaism. Deception is inherent in our fallen nature. However you want to explain it, the narrative of Eden serves to warn us that our instinct for placing human reason on the throne of life is a rejection of God and truth. God gave us the intellect to serve as steward, or executive, not as legislator and judge. An executive carries out — executes — the program of the owners, seeking the best way to preserve their interest. Somehow we as an entire race of beings prefer to invest our minds with the authority to decide what that interest is and ought to be. We are rejecting God’s ownership, and doing our best to avoid His calling us to account for bad stewardship of lives granted by His hand.
But His truth cuts its own path through our souls, blazing new trails. Objective truth is a myth, a lie in itself. While we use words like “true” to characterize a lot of things, strictly speaking truth is not merely consistent with objective facts. Truth is moral accuracy, consistent with the revelation of God’s character.
Thus, truth must remain ever invisible to those who substitute any other meaning for “truth.” The only way we can understand this world after the Fall is to seek His revelation. The revelation includes the very intellectual assumptions behind it, so if you don’t approach Scripture from a Hebrew mystical point of view, you can’t understand revelation. Hebrew mysticism is how we are wired. It’s all part of the same package. The various Law Covenants were contextual expressions of revelation. Jesus clarified them all in part by insisting on dragging the whole discussion back where it belonged under Hebrew mystical thought. Who can forget Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemas about spiritual birth?
Thus, we don’t merely live the Laws, but we become the Laws. We incorporate that revelation into our own characters in a lifelong study that peels away the layers of crap that don’t belong. Start with the conscience you have; obey it as scrupulously as you can. Pray for the strength of commitment to do the best you know. At the same time, expect to find that, as you explore the farther reaches of commitment, your understanding will change. Your conscience is just an expression of your current level of moral understanding.
We all stand in different places along our own individual path of obedience. We should hardly be surprised when particulars vary. Uniformity is another of those big Western lies. All we need to really understand about a brother or sister in faith is how closely we can work with them at any given point in time. That we must expect to find others who share the mission goes without saying.
Our biggest problem right now is that the approach outlined here will isolate us from the rest of the world. Those willing and able to handle this viewpoint will be thinly scattered across the face of humanity right now. Still, you are hardly alone. We are restoring the truth, an alternative world that almost disappeared not so long ago. Western Civilization very nearly succeeded in wiping away the truth. But at the zenith of its power, the West is dying, rotting from the inside. This moral black hole is collapsing upon itself. What we build today with a fresh moral understanding of revelation will surely not replace it, but simply resurge in the face of whatever it is God allows to rise up after the West. Our alternative world has always been there, and will remain after this world is gone.
So it lies with us to remember this time of moral battle. We are to study and abstract the lessons we learn in this time and be ready to speak them to another false world coming later. If you know where to look, you can see what’s on the horizon. Yet none of that matters; it’s God’s problem. He has pointedly warned us we are unlikely to get much advance notice on the details of His plans for human politics. What He did give us was some general warnings on how to keep from getting lost in such minutiae. He has long warned that nature will erupt in upheavals at least as bad as the human catastrophes because humanity continues rejecting His revelation, the revelation that explains how Creation operates.
We expect things to get worse before they get better. We expect the insanity of human flight from the Flaming Sword of Eden to continue. We must turn back to that entrance of Eden. Our hopes and dreams are that just a few can respond to our moral message and follow us there. Don’t presume to choose who should respond; just live what you can grasp and leave the results in divine hands. That’s all it really requires to light the fires of divine glory. Despite appearances here in the Shadowlands, we actually belong to an Invisible Domain in another realm entirely. We see the glory of His moral truth shining through the shadows.
Our expectations, hopes and dreams are aligned with God’s character, rooted in His Realm.
