Israel had lost her way. Worse than the Jewish people losing their ancient heritage of mystical religion was their utter inability to share any truth with any other nations. Jehovah had revealed to them they were to be a kingdom of priests, in the sense they were to teach the nations the Laws, by living the Law and showing how it brought such rich blessings. By this, they would bring God to man, and man to God. Israel failed this calling miserably. She failed mostly because she simply no longer understood the Law, nor the God who gave it.
It waited for Jesus to be born to both explain the Law and show where it pointed. The ultimate truth of things cannot be declared in human terms, so He spoke always in parables, by which the Kingdom of Heaven was symbolized. The other half of His work was explaining the proper understanding of the Law, which Law was itself the ultimate parable. The alienation from the Law as revealed by God was only half done in the Exile. The work and words of Jesus make no sense if we do not grasp the full extent of the displacement we find when the Gospels open the New Testament. The true meaning of the Law was utterly incomprehensible to the Jewish leaders of His day, and we must show how they got there.
But on the way to that understanding, we must take a moment to show something critical. The Nation of Israel was called to live the Law and teach the Law. They did not live the Law, and so lost the understanding to teach it. Jesus corrected that. The teaching of Jesus was altogether a matter of the Law and it's ultimate spiritual meaning. The Cross was hinted at in the Law, a full realization of what Moses meant. While His death and resurrection have opened to us His presence living in us, there have always been people with living spirits, people who had been "born again." Only once did He mention that phrase as a term for spiritual birth. He used it in discussion with Nicodemus, a Doctor of the Law, as it were. This man, so far as we know, did eventually serve Christ. We notice during that meeting at night the man had no comprehension of symbolic language, and stumbled over the literal meaning of the terms Jesus used. Jesus went on to point out the necessity of symbolic logic and parabolic thinking. What first grabbed the attention of Nicodemus was Jesus' teaching of what the Law meant. Jesus insisted His was the most accurate understanding, since He was not just another rabbi, but the Son of God, the ultimate source of all man could know about God. In the teachings of Jesus, we see Him discussing obedience to God via the Law, as a path way to the Spirit. Yet, He openly admitted most of the world would never become spiritual. So in His teaching there was still something for those on the level of the flesh. It was altogether challenging for men without a living spirit, but not out of reach. Jesus taught the Law.
In reaching out to a lost world, we do not counsel them to be born again, but to turn from their sins. This is not merely a tool to manipulate people into realizing they are sinners in need of a Savior. The lost souls of this world are not somehow simply a project, people unworthy of our attention otherwise. We must work from the basis of a genuine love for them where they are, in the flesh and under the Laws. They need to know what God offers to them without regard to whether they are born-again. In raising high the standard of God's Laws, we point out a spiritual truth, but there are no words for that spiritual truth. Those things are taught as Jesus did, in parables, in the Laws as parable. Those with a living spirit will grasp the parables. Those without must still see the Laws. The way to spiritual birth is through the Laws, not as the Judaizers who bound men under the false legalism of broken Judaism, but the Laws of God for all mankind as He revealed them. Jesus said the whole Laws of God hung from choosing to love God, in the sense of loyalty, and loving your neighbor based on that loyalty. A lawyer present recognized it as true. Israel was not called to teach deep spiritual truth, but to teach the Laws and their blessings on earth at that same level of understanding. It was not merely observance of restrictions and demands on behavior, but of loyalty from the heart -- that was the Law. Within that framework, God would have awakened spirits to eternal enlightenment. To the dead spirits of the world we call out with the Laws of God, warning of sins and the loss of shalom, the promises for those who embrace the Laws of God. We must have an earnest calling to all fallen mankind, showing them the way to the best this life has to offer under God's hand. In the process, some of them will awaken in the spirit, and seek the deeper truth beyond.
Our message to the world is "live right," not, "be born again." They cannot choose the latter, but they must choose the former. Today we see a conflict in Christians, a divide between those who embrace the miracle aspect of spiritual rebirth (Calvinist/Reformed) and those who see the Word demanding we walk according to the Laws (Legalist/Arminian). What keeps them apart is not a question of who is right and who is wrong, but Aristotle. His brand of abstract logic, brought into the church, demands men follow things to their logical conclusion. The Word of God is neither Reformed nor Legalist, and certainly not Universalist, nor any of those other things. The Word is also not Aristotelian, but most of Church History sees Christians embracing Aristotle's false framework for structuring knowledge. Only by the mixing of his pagan understanding do we see a conflict where none exists.
Aristotle rejected the Hebraic understanding of things. Among his students today are Christians who disparage what they call "Eastern Mysticism" without realizing that label applies to the Bible's own viewpoint. But because that label lumps together a host of varying and discordant things, the whole is rejected for something which seems so obvious, so familiar and so easy to us. Our civilization is built on Aristotle, as it were. How did we get from the First Century Christian world-view to a pagan Western rationalism? We took our cue from the Jews, who embraced it first.
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By Ed Hurst
07 May 2009
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