Futile Philosophy 4 (mirrored on archive.org):
Futile Philosophy 4
23 October 2021If you rely on what your senses and reason tell you, you’ll never understand reality.
From our human capabilities, we surmise that nature is totally unconcerned about us, if not outright hostile at times. This is false. Jesus boldly spoke to supposedly inanimate objects around Him with the full expectation that those things would hear and obey. The Book of Psalms is filled with language that indicates the natural world is alive, sentient and willful. Do you suppose all of that poetic language is more than just hyperbole and lyricism?
Adam and Eve in the Garden did not have to sweat; they managed the Garden the way Jesus managed the situations in His ministry. They spoke and things obeyed. Elijah and Elisha did the same. There is something unique to the Hebrew outlook that opens the door to this authority. There are several elements we can discern by approaching Scripture from the Hebrew mystical assumptions about reality.
First, it should be obvious that miracles always conform to God’s purpose. They are not conditioned on the basis of human need. Lots of people in the Bible needed things that they didn’t receive, including Jesus. He obeyed His Father’s purpose in every context. How would you know the purpose of God?
It’s the Flaming Sword at the Gate of Eden; it’s the Cross of Christ. They are both the same thing. You must first understand that this life is inherently false. You cannot trust your perceptions and reason to tell you the whole story. Those faculties will lie to you about the fundamental purpose of living. Revelation says a lot about that purpose that you could not possibly discern otherwise.
Divine revelation has always come in covenants. Creation itself operates on the basis of the revealed covenants. Nature is neither hostile nor unconcerned; it is begging for us to seize the revealed truth in the covenants so that we can understand God’s design in Creation. If you approach nature from outside a covenant awareness, you cannot get cooperation.
A fundamental concept of the path to miracles — the path back to Eden — is that first and foremost you must understand the Covenant of Christ and the basic requirements of God’s Law. You must engage the higher faculty in your heart. The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that the calling of Israel as a nation was never just a matter of the law code, but the feudal commitment to God from the heart. The provisions of law were just the conceptual structure for people who needed to understand the character of their Sovereign Lord. Once they absorbed the law code, they were in a position to get to know Him personally, which was always the whole point. The prerequisite for standing before the Lord was to shift your conscious awareness from your head into your heart.
The Covenant of Moses presumed a priori that you were in a feudal relationship with the Creator, a sovereign-vassal condition that made you a member of the divine family household. Everything about revelation and Creation is personal, intensely personal. The entire universe must be treated like a person and many persons. It’s not a question of what’s real in that sense, but where you must stand in order to harvest your divine heritage from the covenant. You must assume that the universe is alive, sentient and willful on some level. You’ll never understand it with your mind, only with your heart.
The purpose of living is the glory of God. Nothing else matters. He is the only being with a truly accurate assessment of His self-worth. Creation’s greatest and fullest benefit is to glorify God, to boost His reputation, as you would if you were serving a middle eastern desert sheikh. That’s the image God uses to portray Himself. It is fundamental to understanding reality. Everything else hangs from that.
Things may appear to work well enough without all that, but you get only what mankind has already, with all the hideous slaughter and hatred and moral blindness that goes with it. To fully prosper in this life, you have to despair of it in the first place. By His divine decree, mortal humans deserve a short miserable life, a lingering painful death, and eternity in Hell. Never seek to make the world a better place; it is slated for destruction. Things will never go right in this world, but you do have the option to place yourself in God’s favor, where He can mitigate the sorrows of this life as a sample of the life after this one. He chooses for you individually what this life can be, and you can wallow in rejection, or you can reach for maximizing the opportunities He has granted you.
And you cannot possibly know what that is until you accept sight-unseen what He has decreed for you. Once you do, it will always mean a covenant existence, with the aim of building a community of faith with others. You must embrace with others the Covenant of Christ and all the fundamental requirements for life on this earth to demonstrate that this life is not worth anything, except as the means to God’s glory.
The first churches were all miniature copies of what Israel was supposed to be. Those congregations were spiritual families living together like an extended family household. They were organized on Hebrew feudal lines. Those were prerequisites. You may not be able to form a church body like that today without a lot of work, but you must be personally committed to it just to get started. You must embrace a timeless viewpoint, to understand that you are just a tiny piece in a vast history of Covenant relations with God. If your generation has a bad moral infrastructure (ours is awful), then the burden is upon you to do your part to invest all you have in restoring what God wants to give His people someday in the future. Your holiness today is front-loading for the covenant blessings of future generations. Be selfless; apparent futility is a lie.
It’s all about the process, not the product. Don’t try to own the results. Be faithful to your part and let God handle the outcomes; it will never make sense to you otherwise.
Jesus was restoring the feudal covenant of Moses in His ministry. This was necessary in order to transition to the new covenant in His blood. He had to complete the purpose of the Covenant of Moses in Himself. A major element in this was the business of Jews treating each other like family, something long lost in previous centuries. That meant setting aside the false feudalism in favor of spiritual dominion. So, the church today must learn the ways of Hebrew feudalism, revealed by God as the fundamental nature of reality even before the Fall.
Finally, the burden is upon us as His people to restore the heart-centered awareness of reality. By this conscious focus on the convictions in your heart, you will become sensitive to Creation as personal and persons. You’ll instinctively understand in your heart what is good and right by divine fiat, and you’ll long for it. Then, you will be on the road to seeing the miracles built into reality.
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