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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Doctrine of Atonement

Posted on April 28, 2019 by ehurst

This is a major point of conflict between the Western and Eastern Christian traditions.

The Western view is based on tribal Germanic mythology, which bears an inherently vindictive and punitive view of God’s wrath. The image of God that arises from this tradition is closest to the literary image of the grouchy Norse god. It makes God’s wrath unpredictable and capricious. This is a pagan view; it is not consistent with the Bible. This is why Western Christian theology tends to view Jesus as a departure from the God of the Old Testament, and hostile to the continuity between Jesus and the Old Testament.

The Eastern view does not see fallen men as evil, but as sick. Instead of the Western need of placating an angry God, this is the view that we need healing for our warped understanding. The Eastern church prefers the term “recapitulation” instead of “atonement.” The call of Christ is more of union than paying a penalty. The Eastern Christ reunites fallen man with God’s ideal; it’s a stronger focus on the work of His life than on His death. It’s a much stronger emphasis on the dual nature of Christ.

We find both views lacking in the sense of a false dichotomy. We emphasize the centrality of covenant in what we teach here. Everything is explained by referring to the applicable covenant. For us, Christ came to restore the covenant communion we had with God in the Garden of Eden. The mission of Christ was to bring us back to the Flaming Sword so we could enter Eden again. We don’t explain it in abstractions nor mere symbolism, but in terms of biblical narrative.

The problem with the Fall was asserting the primacy of human self, the intellect over faith. We are all equipped with the mechanism of faith, but our sense of the adequacy of reason stands in the way. We insist on discerning and reasoning out for ourselves what is good and what is evil. So long as we trust in our human capabilities, we exclude ourselves from redemption.

The death of Jesus was substitutionary in the sense that, once we bought into Satan’s lie about trusting our own intellects and becoming our own gods, we were flatly unable to find our way back to faith. This placed us outside of Eden and under wrath, deserving of eternal destruction. Jesus took our destruction upon Himself. His work was both restoration of divine truth and healing, but also opened showed us the path back to Eden. We can choose self-death before we come to the grave.

This in inherent in the Old Testament. There, the path of revelation was God’s chosen self-disclosure through the various covenants. It began with the simple Covenant of Seth just outside of Eden. As mankind traveled farther and farther from Eden, things get more complicated for a return to the Flaming Sword. Next came the Covenant of Noah, rather clearly stated in prophecy Noah gave before the Flood. But mankind traveled farther still from Eden. Sometime later, at least one man reached the self-death of the Flaming Sword: Abraham. The Covenant of Abraham is a genuine covenant of faith, the first recorded instance of a very personal communion between God and man. It was implied under the Covenant of Noah, but was offered only upon reaching that point of self-death. Abraham was marked for return to Eden.

However, Abraham was also the first link in the Covenant of Moses. Moses was a specific implementation of the broader Covenant of Noah, a much more clear and precise contextual statement of Noah. During the time of ancient Israel, the path back to Eden — now quite long — meant a great deal of struggle to find the Flaming Sword and make use it for self-death. Moses was meant to create a condition of longing for peace with God, but it was by then a very difficult path. Still, it was the best path, though Noah’s Covenant was still open to those who were not called to Moses.

Jesus used the term “born from above” with Nicodemus. Paul says that spiritual birth is entirely a matter of God’s initiative and election of recipients. We do not “get” it; we realize that God chose us and embrace it with joy. It is beyond us to even understand it, and Paul flatly says we cannot want it because self-death is necessary for it. The fleshly self cannot wish for its own death; it cannot embrace the Flaming Sword. Only the power of God awakening the dead human spirit can overcome the resistance of the flesh. Jesus didn’t bring us this spiritual birth. It was always there. Abraham was elect; clearly the likes of Samuel and King David were beyond the point of self-death. Jesus was disappointed that Nicodemus exhibited no self-death level of personal faith and understanding after having so long tread the path of the Covenant.

What Jesus brought us was the shortcut back to the Flaming Sword. Instead of treading a long path of conditioning under the Law Covenants (Moses and Noah), we can take a shortcut to the Covenant of Faith (like Abraham) and receive the awakening of our awareness of divine election. We don’t have to first submerge our lives in some Law Covenant, but we can find faith freely and seize the Flaming Sword.

But what is supposed to follow that discovery of election is then to go back and devote the rest of our lives to that long path of learning what the Law Covenants were designed to teach our flesh. We can’t know what Abraham had accomplished before God called him into covenant, but we do know that his mistakes indicate how his faith had to grow. This is where we find ourselves today. Christ paid the price of that long trek up front; He substituted His own sinless life on the Cross so we didn’t have to carry one to get back to the Flaming Sword and the Gate of Eden. But we do have to carry one once we embrace His sacrifice on our behalf.

Just a reminder: In Paul’s writings in particular, but in the New Testament in general, the references to “the Law” often mean something other than Moses. You have to read it in context, because sometimes it refers to the Talmud, not Moses. Sometimes it refers to legalism as the mental habit of Pharisees, portraying them as some awful, implacable law, because they were often part of the Jewish government. At other times, it does, indeed, refer to the Covenant of Moses. But because people don’t grasp the contextual distinctions, they become legalistic about the words “not under law but under grace.”

Law is grace. It came as a measure of God’s mercy to bring us back to the Flaming Sword, and back to the Gate of Eden. The Law points the way, but it cannot of itself give you faith. That comes only when you embrace self-death. Only God knows if, when and how you can get there.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 8:1-12

Posted on April 27, 2019 by ehurst

Personally, I suspect John was like any other writer, in that sometimes he published something only to wish later he had remembered to include something important. In some English translations you will find marginal notes or footnotes indicating that this passage was not in all the manuscript copies of John’s Gospel. Yet no one is going to argue that it is inconsistent with what Jesus taught elsewhere.

The issue is not whether the woman sinned. Nor is the issue that the accusers failed to bring the man who was equally guilty of lying with her; that was just a symptom. The issue is that the accusers were themselves in violation of the Covenant and had no leverage against this woman. Their own infidelity was greater than hers.

We need to remind ourselves that the Covenant of Moses presupposed a tribal feudal society. Everyone lived in their own kinfolks’ armpits, and your cousins knew your private business. Your village was generally your own clan. When outsiders moved into the area, they were gradually pulled into this because it was inherent in the Covenant that you watched out for your neighbors. The word translated as “neighbor” meant in practice your close relative. This was considered a blessing in their society.

With everyone so close to each other socially, the business of adultery was a major threat to shalom. How could you trust your cousin if you thought he was poaching on your wife? This is what moves relatives to murder each other. But even if you lived in Jerusalem where a good portion of the population were not related to each other, the principle remains that shalom leans hard on that same high level of trust, treating everyone as your beloved cousin. It’s not an open society; it’s very tightly closed by virtue of familial concern. How many times was Israel told in the Law and Prophets that your fellow Israelite was your kin?

There, in or near Jerusalem, sometime after the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus was sitting with His disciples. As was sometimes customary among Pharisaical rabbis, a group of elders brought a case to Jesus for judgment. This time it was a very real and literal case, not just a made-up narrative. It was a woman caught in the very act of adultery.

We need not suppose Jesus was doing anything particularly meaningful by ignoring them. The most obvious reason for pretending they weren’t there was to ensure the tension was high before He spoke. Had He not already condemned their materialistic legalism repeatedly? But they pressed Him for a response.

The problem here is that not a single one of the accusers had moral standing to bring a case against her. Clearly they were not guarding shalom. They were guarding the law as they imagined it to be, as if it were too feeble to deliver its own power. In their lives, it was powerless because they weren’t clinging to it at all. They did fail to observe the requirement of bring both parties to adultery to judgment, but that was just a symptom of a far bigger failing. They weren’t keeping the Law in the first place. They were laboring under their own sins, and not one of them was manfully taking up the mantel of shepherd over the people.

Instead, they had constructed a massive edifice of petty, nit-picking rules that they could barely keep up with themselves. It was part of their teaching to worry about that. But in spiritual terms, they had no peace with God. So when Jesus suggested that the one without sin should cast the first stone, this wasn’t to prevent her punishment. It was to execute their own punishments. If there was no community of faith seeking peace with God, then there was nothing to protect by executing the woman.

If anyone had standing to stone her, it was Jesus. I’m willing to bet she understood that on some level. When the men had all left, He asked her if any of her accusers stood against her still. She addressed Him as if He were a valid judge. Jesus then replied that He was not the one accusing her. It wasn’t necessary at this point. He released her to her own conscience and advised her to clean up her life. The implication is that divine justice would come to her one way or another if she didn’t seize this opportunity.

Inherent in this brief scene is the declaration that the Covenant had been so completely vacated by the vassal party that God as sovereign was no longer treating Israel as His chosen covenant community. The people did not want it, apparently. At least, not enough of them wanted it to warrant enforcing the strictest provisions to protect shalom. They had failed and flagrantly violated the requirements repeatedly for so long that there was no shalom left to protect. On the earthly plane, the government of Israel under the Covenant was being dissolved.

So Jesus turned to His disciples and told them that He was the shining glory of God in this world. He was the new government appointed by God to lead whatever “nation” would arise to follow Him. This was the only way to lead people out of darkness. The people of the Covenant of Moses had refused that mission.

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