Theology and Practice: Evangelism

Posted on May 4, 2019 by ehurst

We seek and keep shalom.

We live by the Covenant and shalom is the whole point. It’s more than just the blessings granted to obedience; it is obedience itself. Biblical Law is its own reward. It is harmony with reality.

We could use other words here, of course — compassion and mercy, for example. Genuine compassion and mercy are part of the Covenant. It’s not enough that we seek to build shalom within the covenant community of faith, but that we project it outward. Evangelism as a term generally implies the individual effort toward missions.

First and most obvious is the sensory field of our hearts. Based on our individual mission and calling, we use our heart to identify people to whom the Lord wants us minister. We aren’t looking at instrumentality; we do what is just because it is just. Justice includes compassion and mercy, restoring in some limited ways the justice that should have been there in the first place. The limits are not just the mission and calling, but the very real blessings that God has given us. We cannot give what we do not have from God, and we most certainly cannot trust human reason to decide what we ought to be giving. But we project our overwhelming compassion from our hearts, waiting for the signal from God to give what He says we should give.

But in a broader and more general sense, or very presence is the Presence of God. Our obedience to His Law bleeds away the authority of demons. Our faith moderates the justified wrath of God, unless He warns us to flee a particular situation. This is crucial to the heart-led way. This is how we discern where and to what we called, and whom we touch.

In general, we are inclined to purposeful, and sometimes random, acts of kindness to express the power of shalom to others. Naturally, compassion is not defined by human reason. Human need is not the guide to what we do. It has the purpose of our Lord’s glory, and human need is simply the opening we use to shine. The Law of Noah teaches us not to be manipulated by shallow human purpose. We can’t let them drag us into their concerns. For His glory, there are times we must say, “no.”

What most Western Christians don’t understand is that we have no interest in simply getting people to hang out with us. Instead, we should expect our pursuit of shalom to polarize, to drive away those we cannot help in the first place, while calling out to those whom the Lord has appointed us to serve up a heaping dose of His glory. So all that effort with analyzing the demographics and structured appeals is wasted. We operate under the leading of our convictions, not man-centered reckoning in the flesh. We do what our heart directs us to do, and nothing else.

Walking in Biblical Law, by the power of Christ’s Spirit, is in everyone’s best interest.

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Theology and Practice: Justice

Posted on May 3, 2019 by ehurst

The Law of God, expressed in His Covenants, is the measure of justice.

The fundamental question is: Who has been offended? When one has answered this question, all other issues have already been decided. Once we as children of His covenant household recognize God as the One to whom all are indebted as Creator of all things, the path to restoring justice has already been settled.

Western Civilization on this point is particularly pernicious and false. The ancient Germanic tribal mythology says that justice is a matter of either offense to the individual, or offense against the State. The State is now the stand-in for the Western feudal lord who owned everyone within the boundaries of his physical domain. The State is absolutist in this. But the sense of personal offense remains a critical part of the Anglo-American sense of justice, and figures into the punitive nature of State-approved justice.

Thus, the Western habit of making punitive justice a torment and overwhelming sense of doom on the guilty party serves only to create yet another victim demanding redress. This is how criminals are hardened, since the State clearly rejects them forever and permits no path for return to society. One who has sinned against the State, even when it is merely a proxy for personal offense, is doomed forever. The penalties follow them to the grave.

This sets up the false dichotomy of allowing some to get off Scott free because the State needs them for some reason. The other half of that mythology is demanding that “Christians” forgive the most heinous crimes, as if this is actually what God demands. That brand of “heroic forgiveness” is a blasphemous lie, because it rests on pagan mythology.

This is not the biblical approach. The issue in the Bible is that all offense is against God. There is no crime against persons, and the State is not permitted as a proxy in any way. The mere existence of the State is an offense against God, because the fundamental nature of divine justice is that everything is personal. Pretending to make things impersonal (under the guise of objectivity) and enthroning human reason as the demigod of justice is blasphemous. All justice is personal. Justice is a personal attribute of God as Creator, the ultimate Person of persons. Everything rests on His divine moral character, woven into the fabric of reality.

Furthermore, all property is personal in God’s eyes. Everything on this earth is either granted by God or it is stolen. Everything is held in feudal service to the Lord. Thus, justice of material things is restoring God’s dominion; it means restoring things to whom He granted them for the sake of His rule.

We then take all cases to Him for justice. Even in the heat of physical battle, we trust in Him to deliver our opponents in our hands, or accept defeat for His glory, or simply maintain a balance or standoff. Resolution is whatever God says it is. The Covenant of Noah flatly states that blood demands a price; there must be a restoration of divine justice. That price may vary with the context, but no one gets off without making amends or seeking to restore what they took. But it is handled as a divine debt, not as some personal retribution. God is the one who determines justice. He is unfailing in His promise to speak to our hearts about what divine justice means.

Furthermore, divine justice itself is reflected in the tribal feudal structure of government. This is the fundamental requirement of Noah’s Covenant, which now applies to all humanity for so long as there are rainbows in the sky. In Genesis, rainbows and rain came after the Fall, so the Covenant of the Rainbow (Noah) stands until the redemption of all things at Christ’s Return. No government has any business poking into your daily life unless that government is your family by blood or covenant. There can be no justice in God’s eyes under any other system of government.

Our duty under the Covenant of Christ (Biblical Law), which includes Noah, is to strive to the extent He makes possible the standard of justice in the Bible. We tolerate human governments as the result of God’s inscrutable cattle herding, but we never forget that they are not blessed by God under any covenant. There can be no detailed guidelines on how this is supposed to work out. Your calling and mission, and your heart-led guidance from the Lord, is what determines how you will try to execute His justice.

However, what we must understand is that there is no artificial limits on Noahic justice. The elder of the household of faith has full divine authority up to, and including, execution of someone who commits a crime that genuinely threatens shalom. Anyone with eldership who refuses to make room in their hearts for such an extremity is rejecting God’s standard of justice. That this will inevitably bring us into conflict with the modern secular State means we all must remain careful to keep our hearts open to God and dominant over our thinking. God does tell His servants what He requires. That includes His servants accepting whatever human consequences proceed from it, and trusting by faith that God will handle it.

Under the Covenants, forgiveness requires the guilty party make amends. There can be no genuine forgiveness from one party only. All forgiveness is three-way, in that it always includes God as the Guarantor, and He says quite flatly that He requires certain things of those who sin. Whether we as a party of forgiveness ever see the sinner repent is not the issue; but we should expect to see it often enough when we place forgiveness on the altar before the Lord. Eventually the guilty party must also come to that altar to claim it, or they die under wrath.

But the choice to how we respond to offense is a matter of referring all things to the Holy Spirit within. We are obliged to our feudal Sovereign as His vassals to handle His business according to His revealed standards, but revelation does not stop with Scripture. If He requires action to defend His feudal grant to us, we will know in our hearts, and we will know what that response should be — but only if we are soaked in an awareness of His Covenant Law and His revelation of justice. We do not take offense for our own sake, but for the sake of His glory, His reputation.

Justice is whatever God says it is, and His Law says He speaks through hearts committed to His glory.

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Theology and Practice: Worship

Posted on May 3, 2019 by ehurst

In English, His proper name is Jehovah.

He still answers to a lot of other things, but the business of worship is “calling on the name of the Lord.” That is a very ancient phrase that refers to celebrating the greatness and goodness of some important person. It includes bringing gifts that represent what their benevolence and protection provides to you. It is public promotion and acknowledgement. It means promoting that person’s fame based on their position. Thus, “their name” is a reference to their role in your life. So in English we call Jehovah things like God, Lord, Savior, Creator, etc. We call those “honorifics.”

Worship is shouting, singing, making offerings and similar activities and rituals related to focusing the attention on God. Worship does not include teaching and preaching. Those activities can be conducted in conjunction to gathering for worship, but they are not worship. The modern Western habit of referring to preaching as the “sacrament of the Word” is not biblical. Whatever else it is, it has become a way of focusing attention on the man, not His God. It elevates the preacher far too closely to God Himself.

Saying this does not hinge on some imaginary divine order of things, but is the proper answer to our cultural failures. A critical element of worship is recognizing the tension between the way things were done in some previous cultural context and the way we do things now. The New Testament Christian church meeting was based on the synagogue habit. The structure of synagogue meetings included the awareness that the only place one can hold formal corporate worship was in the Temple. That was commanded by God under the Covenant of Moses.

We are not under Moses and the Temple no longer exists. The collection of offering rituals commanded for Temple worship no longer apply. Christ is the one ritual sacrifice for all time. We now worship Him not in any temple, but in Spirit and in Truth. The location and setting are immaterial; what matters are the psychological effects on the worshiper. Thus, we develop a worship experience that pushes aside the world and brings our focus onto God alone.

As a counter to the particular sins of our age, I would suggest our best worship setting is as close to nature as the context permits. There’s nothing wrong with fitting a natural setting to the safe gathering of however many bodies show up, and all that it entails, but most public parks are much better than so-called “worship centers” commonly used in Western Christian worship. We need to get away from the imagery of building temples, because it takes the focus away from the nature of God as Spirit and puts too much emphasis on the “sacred” facilities. This only encourages materialism. We need the imagery of you and I as temples of God, that our lives are devoted to His sacred uses, not some material repository that separates us from our holiness.

Whatever reason we might have had for making preaching such a critical part of worship, it has turned out to be a mistake. We need to separate the preaching and prophetic word from worship rituals because our culture cannot avoid worshiping the speaker. We need to avoid placing ministering to people in proximity to ministering to God because it approaches blasphemy even at the best of times. Let us endeavor to stop calling New Testament synagogue meetings “worship.” Let us bring the sacrifice of our lives and and our worship in purity.

Let’s make worship about God and God alone.

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Theology and Practice: Israel

Posted on May 2, 2019 by ehurst

We reject Dispensationalism and Zionism.

They were the Chosen Nation, under the Covenant of Moses. They walked away from that Covenant. The Talmud is a Hellenistic perversion of what was an already shaky adherence to Moses. Judaism is not the religion of the Old Testament. In that sense, Jews have zero claim on the promises of the Covenant of Moses. Political Zionists have even less claim.

However, should any Jew return to Moses, we will be first in line to support them as people of the Chosen Nation. Should they turn to Christ, their promises of shalom will be greater than they are for any Gentiles. But they still have to embrace how Christ was the ultimate expression of the Covenant of Moses. What He taught was God’s Law, and corrected the weak spots of Moses. His call to faith was the fulfillment of Moses.

While the Jewish people have no legitimate claim to the name “Israel,” we can be sure few in this world will ever accept our statement on this.

When the Chosen Nation rejected the Messiah, they were no longer under the feudal protection of Jehovah. Satan stepped forward and claimed them. As a whole, Judaism is Satan’s religion, and Jews are his special nation. Zionism is just a political offshoot of this, even more thoroughly deceived. Thus, modern Jewish political activism serves Satan.

The modern country called “Israel” is incapable of moral justice; she is hostile to it. Her purpose in serving Satan is to provoke and deceive the other nations of this world. She further serves the purpose of deceiving the Elect in Christ. She distracts the Elect from their true mission of living the Covenant on this earth.

The nature of Judaism is to seek dominance over the human race; the Talmud teaches that Gentiles are not human, but animals. In Jewish eyes, it is prejudice and oppression that the world does not serve them slavishly. Thus, it is no surprise that Israel seeks to distract all the world from even what little good they might do by accident as cattle whom God herds. Israel is the single biggest threat to the rest of humanity finding Christ, or even so much as the Covenant of Noah. There can be no peace as long as Zionism exists.

Thus, the only thing that makes Israel special in this world is that she is the one true dedicated servant of Satan, while all other nations are simply herds of cattle before the Lord. Israel will be destroyed in due time; there is no need for any kind of organized activism against her. And Jews are not proper objects of hatred; they are to be pitied. In our daily lives, we pray for their redemption from the Devil’s control. Given the nature of prayer, it works best if you pray for those Jews you encounter personally. Be on guard against demonic activity around them. Live before them the covenant shalom they rejected, and so provoke them to envy.

We are not the least concerned with accusations of antisemitism, since such are unavoidable.

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Theology and Practice: Missions

Posted on May 2, 2019 by ehurst

Covenants remain the measure of all things.

The mission of Israel was to be a covenant nation. Nothing else mattered. Their identity as the people of the Covenant of Moses was everything. The Covenant itself said that DNA didn’t matter; national identity was based on adherence to the Covenant. Anyone in the world could become a member of the nation by embracing the Covenant.

The whole point was to vivify the revelation of God. They were to be a people who conspicuously lived the truth of God so that anyone could see it clearly. The business of their land and borders was promised as a resource for this mission, but that real estate was not essential to the Covenant. It was not their land; it was God’s. If they were faithful, they could keep it as their inheritance. If they were unfaithful, the land itself would go to war against them.

Now that whole thing is gone. They vacated the Covenant. A critical element in what Christ can to do was give them one last chance to get back on course. He was their Covenant personified. The full authority of that Covenant rested in His Person. They rejected that one last chance, and in so doing, rejected the Covenant. But their mission still stands. So now that mission belongs to Christ and His followers.

This is not Replacement Theology. There is no other Chosen Nation on this earth, nor can there ever be one. Rather, the New Israel is symbolic; it is a nation of hearts, not a human government entity among other governments of this world. The New Israel is a parallel nation rooted in Heaven. But the mission to live by the Word in this world still stands.

Our mission is simply to be a Covenant People. Our embrace of this covenant is our national citizenship in the Nation of Heaven. The Law Covenants still speak to us in terms of conduct. At a minimum, that means the Covenant of Noah in terms of external form. However, our mission in the world presumes moral maturity on the basis of Noah that blossoms into self-death and faith.

What the world around us sees is the Covenant of Noah. If God awakens their souls, then they will see faith, too. But while the mission is to show them our faith, it must be visible first in our adherence to Noah. We shall be within our faith communities a covenant feudal tribe wherever in this world the Lord plants us. We seek no quarrels with the secular governments that rule this world. We shall be among the most patriotic people on that level. But that is merely the tactics by which we portray our fundamental commitment to Christ as Lord.

The world around us should know that we are people apart in that sense. They should know that we belong to the Covenant, and thus belong to each other. They should sense their exclusion on the basis of the Covenant. They should see the winsome beauty of living by that Covenant. We breathe life into the sheer joy of having a home in Eden, of being at one with Creation, including the natural world around us. The power of self-death at the Flaming Sword should be painfully obvious to them as the manifestation of shalom.

We do not persuade. That is in the hands of God alone. We are ready to explain in whatever terms we can muster, and in whatever terms we discern they can hear. The persuasion is in the power of divine privileges, our otherworldly mystical pragmatism in having no great care for this life. We present the paradox of living better in this world because we are seeking to leave it. So long as the Father keeps us here, we seek His glory in how we live. He is the Persuader.

We have a mission to infiltrate throughout the whole world of human existence in making the presence of the Covenant felt.

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Theology and Practice: Ecclesiology

Posted on May 1, 2019 by ehurst

We evaluate all things by the Covenants.

That’s how God communicates with humanity. The whole revelation of God presumes you understand things in terms of His Covenants. When it comes to questions of human organization in this fallen world, only His Covenants can explain what to expect from God. Outside of those covenants, mankind is nothing but cattle herded by God, and no amount of human reason can discern His will while walking as a herd beast. No conceptual system or structure can capture the essence of what God blesses or curses without first rising to embrace His Law Covenants.

The Law Covenants together assume certain things as prerequisites. To live under God’s Laws, you must organize and form a covenant feudal nation. The entire universe is organized and operates under eastern feudal design. Nature is feudal; reality is feudal. The Garden of Eden was feudal. You simply cannot understand how things work if you don’t embrace that truth. This is what God designed us for, and us for it. The very essence of divine revelation is to point out how reality is organized, and it is feudal. Rejecting His brand of feudalism is rejecting His Son’s life and sacrifice, and His resurrection.

The doctrine and teaching of Christ was founded on the Law of Moses. For anyone outside the nation of Israel, they are under the Law of Noah. As previously noted, Moses is a specific implementation of Noah; if you do Moses, you are doing Noah. But if you aren’t born and raised in Judaism, or if you don’t feel called by God to embrace Moses, then you are under Noah. This is your path to understanding how to walk in the faith of Christ. For most of us, faith in Christ includes Noah. Noah is feudal.

So at the very least, no church can claim to be a genuine body of Christ without that feudal organization. Your church must have both an elder and a priestly figure. That is the goal of any initial formation of a church body. It must be governed by an elder who represents the head of household, who then works with the priestly figure to guide the body in building up the household in the love of Christ. The whole function and purpose of a church is to learn how to organize and work together as a tribal family household. Everything else is just activity; the soul of the church body is coming together as a feudal family household.

This is how we claim the blessings of God. He may see fit to permit or grant a lot of things people like, but as long as churches reject the fundamental element of feudal household structure, they have no claim on God’s blessings. That church remains a de jure herd of cattle who are not permitted to enter the counsel of God. Even if they share DNA, they are not really a family. But any diverse people can become a spiritual family of God under His feudal covenants.

Given how rare it is to find this kind of tribal feudal communion on the earth today, it’s hard to “go to church” without finding yourself in a herd of cattle with no clue on how things actually work. The issue then turns on dominion: How much authority has God granted you? What are the limits and boundaries of your divine calling as a servant of Christ? The next question is tactics: How will God work through you to bring His people under His covenants?

My own experience is that no existing church will tolerate my divine mission and calling. Thus, I am confined to “doing church” within my own home. There is nothing regulatory about my situation; none of my readers should consider themselves required to operate a house church or restricted only to a properly organized feudal household church. Our Radix Fidem covenant is in its infancy in terms of human organization on this earth. There may come a day when the Lord will raise us up as a notable presence in this world, but we don’t have a single church body organized and functioning anywhere that I know of. That is somewhere ahead of us on the path.

Until that day arrives, we are called to invest ourselves in meditating on these things and praying to see them realized by God’s hand. If we within ourselves commit to this faith covenant, which faith includes Noah (or Moses if you are a Jewish convert to Christ) as the fundamental expression of how we do religion, then we can claim so much of God’s covenant blessings as is possible for the individual of faith. If any one member of your earthly family household stands with you, it is the beginning of a church. You can claim a great deal more of the covenant blessings of shalom with two agreeing in heart.

Everything else we could say about what “church” ought to mean starts here.

Our current status as a virtual parish is simply the only way we have for now to commune on any level with those of like faith and calling. Don’t pretend this is where it ends. This is simply where God has us now. If we choose to remain faithful to His Word, it won’t matter what we call it or who else is involved, He will raise up His church on this earth.

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Theology and Practice: The Trinity

Posted on May 1, 2019 by ehurst

Short answer: Our Radix Fidem covenant is neutral on the doctrine of the Trinity. We are neither for it nor against it.

This requires I remind everyone that our covenant is openly anti-western. We don’t believe there is such a thing as objective truth, nor that Scripture contains propositional truth. Granted, it would take a good bit of writing and references to literature from the Ancient Near East, but if you wanted proof, we could prove that the Hebrew intellectual traditions would scoff at the notion of propositional truth. If you really want to read up on that, you can get a bare introduction in my book, A Course in Biblical Mysticism — and it’s a pretty long read just outlining it.

Further, we regard human nature as entirely fallen, intellect and all. You cannot trust the intellect to answer anything of significance in serving Christ. It will at best help you organize and implement what your faith tells you through your convictions. The Bible says your convictions reside in your heart, so we talk about heart-led faith that must rule over the intellect. The New Testament speaks of this world as one giant deception, and only the heart can see through it. In the heart is where the Holy Spirit speaks, not in the fallen intellect. The mind cannot hear the voice of God except as it bows the knee to the heart.

So it should be obvious that the Trinity is a theory of Western minds, neither supported nor denied in Scripture. When the Bible refers to God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it speaks of each in terms of human experience. It’s not meant to be regarded as somehow factual. That is, we are flatly told we cannot intellectually comprehend the Father and the Holy Spirit, and we know Christ only from the testimony of trustworthy followers. But we can know God in terms of all three in our hearts in ways that neither the mind can fully grasp nor words can tell.

If the doctrine of the Trinity helps you keep things organized, fine. If it only seems to confuse things, ignore it. There is no one right “orthodox” answer for us. Remember: When you share things, all you can offer is what you have. One of the greatest sins is to believe your answers are the only answers God approves. We each stand before God as individuals He made, and you cannot pretend to speak for God’s other servants. This is particularly true of things that are clearly your preferred intellectual construct. God does not conform Himself to your reasonings about Him.

In this, we establish the pattern for dealing with a lot of other historical doctrines found in the academic discipline of theology.

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Theology and Practice: Christmas

Posted on April 30, 2019 by ehurst

Shall we celebrate Christmas?

Short answer: It is not so much as mentioned anywhere in the Bible. The Hebrew people did not celebrate birthdays. The individual and immediate family kept track, but had nothing like the mental image we have of it. Their sense of calendar was nothing like ours. Thus, it was common to say in that culture: “So-n-so is about X years old.” Even then, such comments were typically confined to those threshold points in life that were associated with rites of passage.

Now the longer answer: When Ancient Near Eastern royalty celebrated a “birthday” it was actually the day they were vested with royal authority, not the day of their birth. Such vestment ceremonies were carefully timed to avoid conflicts with other major holidays and celebrations, to prevent dragging vassals in and tying them up with rituals and protocols when it might hinder their productivity on the king’s behalf in the first place.

Thus, there is no valid biblical foundation for celebrating Christmas as the birth of Christ.

There are also solid historical reasons for avoiding associating Christ with that holiday. Within the New Testament narrative are multiple clues that Christ could not have been born in winter. For example, shepherds do not sleep out in the fields with their flocks that time of year. It’s most likely that Jesus was born in the springtime when shepherds were watching for sheep giving birth. Keep in mind that He was the Lamb of God.

Another issue is that Luke is careful not to compress the events of his narrative the way most Western readers envision it. The hassle of having to return to the clan home in Bethlehem meant the newlywed couple went early, stayed at least a year while the Magi arrived, and then left for Egypt. There’s no reason to assume Jesus was born the night they arrived, since the inn would have remained full for weeks during that kind of census activity. A lot of people had tents or built a shelter, but this couple found space in a stable.

I’m also not going to expound on the question about Quirinius and when he governed Syria versus the timing of the census in question; Quirinius was in and out of Syria several times in varying imperial capacities over some two decades that include a period that overlaps Herod’s reign (Jesus was born before 4BC).

Our point here is that we shouldn’t celebrate His birth at all, much less on the modern Christmas Day. If all that were not enough, we know for a fact Constantine during the Third Century AD corrupted the church leadership so he could use Christianity as his official religion of the masses. It was frankly a smart political move. Meanwhile, he kept his own devotion to the sun god until on his death bed, and Christmas happens to be the annual feast of that deity.

Thus, I celebrate Christmas as an American cultural holiday carried over from paganized European “Christianity.” Christ never was in Christmas except in the wild and hugely mistaken imagination of Westernized Christian believers. I still sing Christmas carols as a mere cultural tradition and because it’s pretty nice music. However, it is not a holy night in my religion.

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A Little More on Covenants

Posted on April 29, 2019 by ehurst

The context for this is my post on atonement and some comments and reactions (see the previous post).

Review: Creation/reality is inherently feudal. It is feudal in the sense of what “feudal” meant in the Ancient Near East (ANE). This is the setting God planted and grew in which to reveal Himself and the nature of things. This is not the feudalism of Medieval Europe. There are parallels and overlapping ideas here, but the focus in the West has always been real property, an inherently materialistic approach. People within a Western feudal realm are not people but property. The real issue was the territory a feudal lord controlled. In the ANE, people were the property and treasure as living souls. Real estate was just a matter of what a lord’s household occupied effectively. The ANE feudal lord’s domain was the persons under his authority, regardless where they were.

And for that ANE feudal lord, persons within his household might hold any of three different statuses. First came his family, his kin by blood or by adoption. He also had faithful servants who might be treated as family, but knew their status was more tenuous. There were also slaves, people who were far less useful by reason of being somewhat at enmity with their master. It had nothing to do with personal enmity, but as a matter of how they came into the household. Both slaves and servants could be elevated in status by a show of personal devotion, and servants could be reduced to slaves for violating trust, but it depended on the head of household. By tradition and custom, once someone was announced as adopted and vested as a member of the family, that status could not be reduced (see the Prodigal Son). Once someone crossed the threshold into kinship, everything was changed for them.

Granted, the feudal lord might still have to execute his own family members for going too far, but their kinship remained after death. Their burial would reflect this. You might also see banishment to prevent them enjoying the privileges of kinship, but their status was unchanged. Don’t get hung up in all the historical details; this is a metaphor for how God deals with Creation.

As slaves and servants in God’s realm (all Creation), we are under one or another Law Covenant. It happens that most of humanity is under the Covenant of Noah. However, if you read up on the Covenant of Moses, you can extrapolate from the specifics of Moses to the generalities that constitute Noah. Moses was a specific implementation of Noah, a very clear and precise expression of the same basic truth of how God handled people who had not risen to the level of self-death and faith.

The Covenant of Abraham had a specific purpose in the redemption narrative, but in another sense, it serves as an example of an individual faith covenant. Abraham responded to the individual call of faith and was elevated above the Law Covenant that applied (Noah), up to faith and grace. What he gained was implied by Noah, but was much more, because he was no longer just a servant in God’s household, but was adopted as family. In one sense, it was just a logical extension of Noah, so it remains a matter of Noah in terms of conduct. However, it is not wholly covered by Noah, because it introduces the element of adoption as family and heir. It was much more close and personal. His mistakes still brought discipline, but his inheritance remained intact. Faith goes beyond the provisions of Noah, but includes them.

In like manner, any Israelite under the Covenant of Moses could have risen in devotion to the status of a faith covenant like Abraham’s. Indeed, the way it is expressed in the Bible, anyone who rose to full faith adoption had entered into the Covenant of Abraham, since he was their forefather. The whole family of Israel — the entire nation under the Covenant of Moses — was granted the privilege of adoption if they would take seriously their obligations under Moses. But they were still minors. Don’t try to pin this down legalistically; it is meant to be a fuzzy parable. That’s how God communicates to us fallen humans. The nation of Israel was meant to learn how to walk in the privileges of adoption — a wholesale national adoption — via the provisions of the Pentateuch. If they persisted and became truly devoted, if they could just discover the sheer joy of walking in God’s design, they were treated as fully mature adult members. As long as they fell short of that, they were minor children who lacked a range of access granted to adults.

Law is for children (and servants and slaves). Faith is an adult thing. And it was never DNA, but all about the Covenant.

In Christ, the business of having one human nation within the household of God is gone. There is no longer a nation of God on the earth in that kind of special relationship. The shape of the nation is now rooted in Heaven, not on earth. The pathway to faith no longer leads through the Law Covenant. Rather, faith is granted as a gift. The Holy Spirit is no longer withheld until you reach a certain point of moral maturity; He can come into your soul as soon as you realize it’s possible. You are adopted on an individual basis, not on the basis of your maturity within the applicable Law Covenant. Note here that Noah doesn’t work exactly like Moses; under Moses the whole nation was granted provisional childhood in the family as members of the same covenant. Noah demands you create something of that national identity without all the precise particulars of the ANE context. It no longer has any connection to an officially organized national identity on the earth.

So Noah still works as before, and it can still lead people to faith, but Christ Himself warned us that this was increasingly less likely as history rolls on toward the End of All Things. So the order of events is reversed; you can grab faith and then go back and learn what faith requires of you. You still have to cling to Noah, but now it becomes the frame of reference (and frame of reverence) that gives faith meaning on this earth. Your fleshly existence is still obliged to Noah, but not as servants and slaves; we are children learning to walk as adult heirs of our Father.

Addenda: Based on the reaction offline, I note that his post has become another one of those reference points. It’s fundamental to so much of what we teach about the Bible, and so very different from our Western assumptions, that it becomes seminal for everything else we do.

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Project: Theological Topics

Posted on April 29, 2019 by ehurst

Ask questions, because I can’t possibly think of everything by myself.

I sense the leading of the Lord to address some of the major theological topics commonly discussed among Western Christians. Look for titles that start with “Theology and Practice.” It’s not that I have no awareness of Eastern Christianity, but I don’t have a feel for what Eastern Christians would consider important right now. I don’t have a finger on that pulse; it’s not my calling. The world I live in is mostly evangelical American Christian religion and its theology. I’m willing to address anything else you ask about, so don’t hold back. But I’ve already said that theology is nothing more than one person’s mental organization of faith, and what I know best is the stuff I’m reacting against from my own education and experience.

Thus, you should not expect me to issue “ex cathedra” divine guidance on what you should think or believe. This is more about developing a context for your own independent guidance from the Lord. If you share any of my background, this might prove helpful in seeking peace with God, particularly on nagging questions and controversies in Christian religion up to our time.

Right off the bat, you should expect me to say this: Most of the biggest controversies arise only in the context of Western assumptions and biases. For example, the Calvinist-Arminian debate would not arise in an ancient Hebrew society. It’s a silly question for them. We are seeking to move closer to the ancient Hebrew intellectual atmosphere and farther from the heathen world-view of the West. Some of these issues I’ll bring up will quickly turn out to be stupid questions. There is such a thing as stupid questions. Not in the sense that asking them is wrong, but that the answer is to ditch the assumptions behind them.

I can’t promise I’ll be posting daily, but I also can’t promise I won’t load you up multiple posts in a single day. It’s that kind of project and I’m that kind of weirdo. If you get bored, just check the title and skip it when you get tired of reading about it. I don’t take myself that seriously, but people have been asking those kinds of questions from time to time. Again, all I can offer is my own answers.

Where you come down on some of this stuff is wide open. My underlying contention is that divine truth cannot be rendered down to logical explanation in the first place. We all need a way of wrestling with the question of what faith demands of us personally, and the purpose God had in giving us brains was to organize and implement what our hearts discern from His Holy Spirit. We are not ancient Hebrew people, so we aren’t going to come up with their explanations. But we can seek to understand how God revealed Himself through their culture, keeping in mind that He engineered that culture as the best way to reveal Himself and His truth for us.

Feel free to keep for your own religion any traditions that bring you closer to God. You still have to deal with who you are now, in order to become who God intended you to be. My intention here is to help you examine by hopefully asking the right questions.

Feel free to ask your own questions so as to help me process it, as well.

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