Heart of Faith: Chapter 3

Chapter 3 — Rebuilding Redemption

The science is clear enough as far as it goes. Because of the Western bias against a higher faculty in the human soul, a common assumption is that anything not rational is something less. Often you’ll see references suggesting that “something less” is seldom more than sentiment. So pervasive is this assumption that Western Christianity is affected by it. Despite offering good words about having a spirit and desiring spiritual development, what it often boils down to is simply a better form of intellect, human reason more correctly informed by revelation.

As such, revelation is reduced to mere proposition. The notion that God’s character can be reduced to a mere logical proposition is not just foolish, but is blasphemous. Revelation is more than mere words and ideas; it is an expression of God’s Person. Jesus warned that He was forced to use parables because ultimate truth was beyond human language. He spoke of things beyond this realm of existence, using the typical figure of speech — Kingdom of Heaven. It could just as easily have been translated as Kingdom of the Sky, not because it was up in the atmosphere, but somewhere beyond earthly human existence. Hebrew is inherently symbolic as a language.

There is a meeting point between Heaven and Earth: The Law Covenants. Not law as legislation, but law as the covenant requirements of the sovereign in terms of personal commitment. Law was not morality, but a manifestation of it. Morality is defined in Scripture as the character of God. Thus, while the mind is flesh, and the spirit is of the Spirit Realm, the heart is the link between them. The heart is the seat of moral discernment. All of that neuron network has a purpose. The heart is not merely a sensory organ, but the means to also process what it senses. The heart has its own form of intelligence and its own logic. The heart is the one part of us capable of connecting directly to the character of God that is woven into all Creation.

The Bible warns that you can suffocate your heart and not let it speak. It also warns that you can be so thoroughly misinformed that whatever comes from your heart is badly garbled and confused. If the brain isn’t ready for what the heart has to say, your mind cannot accurately analyze the situation and organize a valid moral response.

What we face today is worse than a culture that denies the intelligence of our hearts, but a deeply confused moral mythology. Virtually every thread of Western moral philosophy, including all the conflicting flavors, arises from the dark and confused mythology of Greco-Roman Civilization as interpreted by the Germanic tribal hordes that overran what was left of Greece and Rome at the birth of the Middle Ages. And the organized Church was right there, facilitating the whole thing. In no time at all, the fundamental moral values of organized Christianity became just a modified European heathen value system.

Western Christianity is hardly even conscious of it these days. When you ask about godly virtue, you’ll get good Anglo-Saxon morals. This is what is read back into Scripture, so that everyone is quite certain it is all biblical. While it’s possible to prove academically how this is utter nonsense, good luck getting anyone in church leadership to listen. We don’t have room to delve into all the details here (see my Biblical Morality), but I ask you to be aware that when you begin to open your mind to the guidance of your heart, it will be confused until you become familiar with Hebrew moral culture.

The reason it matters is that morality is not a neutral, multiple choice thing. There is no abstract moral frame of reference; it is either God’s character or it is a lie. God wove His own moral character into the moral fabric of the universe. His personality is reality itself. This is the Creation that Paul says cries out for the revelation of the Children of God. You and I reveal ourselves as His children when we embrace His actual character, not some fabricated pagan nonsense. Progress in growing more Christlike means an improved training of the mind to listen to the heart as it searches the moral fabric for divine imperatives. We can be sure that, while the specifics of the Covenant of Moses applied only to those who participated in that covenant as full members of the ancient Nation of Israel, Paul said it was for us to discern in the Law the moral character of God as it applied to us (2 Timothy 2:15; the OT was their Scripture). The Law of Moses came from the hand of God, so it reflects His moral character in that specific context. However, He created the Hebrew culture as the proper setting for revealing Himself.

The mind alone is not capable of this herculean task. Nor will the task ever be finished, but this is something that calls us ever upward (Philippians 3:14). While it is true that we cannot simply glorify Him in our strength, we can reach for the redemption that He offers. Redemption is the outer gate to His glory. So our internal organizational focus is redeeming things, restoring divine justice as much as He allows (see my book Biblical Law: Divine Justice). Redemption is defined as steadily conforming ourselves to His character. We examine the Law Covenants (Moses and Noah) for clues that our heart will recognize. The mind learns and organizes; the heart recognizes God’s character in things it encounters.

The mind can grasp formal theology and be made to believe certain intellectual concepts as teaching. However, the intellect is incapable of building a genuine faith. Faith is a word that simply means commitment and trust in someone. Only the heart can maintain a commitment contrary to all reason and logic. The faith that took Jesus to the Cross is entirely unreasonable. Only those who subject their mind to the faith of the heart can expect to be faithful. Holiness is not a concept, not an abstract construct to which the flesh can conform. Holiness is living like Christ, who considered His death His greatest victory. The mind might understand what the heart of faith says about that, but cannot get there on its own.