We pause in our journey to rest a moment, to glance back at the long path behind us. The places through which we have passed have left their mark on us, as it should be.
We have seen from the very beginning God intended for us to know Him. When the choice in the Garden corrupted our knowledge of Him, He did not cease from that time working to restore that knowledge. That knowledge is hardly a mere exercise of intellect, but of relationship. He bound us to Him in covenants, starting with the requirement we seek Him, that we seek to renew our knowledge of Him. Thus, in the day of Seth, we began to call upon His name.
He then bound us to a tribal structure under Noah. Not merely the trappings of civilization, as we refer to civility, but the requirement to be bound to others in the irresistible urge to seek their welfare. We are obliged to choose a manner of living which places our own well being in the same basket as the welfare of the people nearest us. This choice is the definition of "love" -- we are commanded to love one another. Seeking any advantage separate from another is inherently evil. While we recognize this is a high standard, it does not require a living spirit to obey this, as God surely demanded all humanity to follow it. Indelibly stamped in human instinct is the revulsion for disloyalty to blood kin. That we should surely fail at times is assumed, and the bulk of civility training is as much about cleaning up messes, of restoring broken relations, as it is about avoiding breaking them in the first place. Bound to a tribe, we are tightly held to that higher standard which God demands of all flesh, which we call His Laws.
The purpose of such a covenant is to provide the fertile ground for planting the seeds of spiritual awareness. At one point, men mistook that demand for a path to centralize rule over all humanity. That rule bore the taint of sin itself, in attempting to renege on the first covenant to call upon God, and surely to deny love. Such is the nature of centralized human government -- it calls itself a god and recognizes on other. So it was destroyed, and God placed communication barriers between unspiritual men to emphasize the awareness of our isolation from one another without love. It then awaited some few rare souls, nurtured by God's grace, to struggle to the light of spiritual awareness. In one man, Abraham, God drove down the initial stake to mark the path to personal spiritual redemption. The elements of sacrificial ritual common to the mixed multitude of human cultures pointed to the requirement of sacrificing the self, all possessions, dreams and choices, as a living offering to the Creator.
Through this Covenant of Abraham, Our Lord called into being a path of redemption for all. First, He granted a greater clarity of what Noah meant by forming a discrete demonstration of His Laws for humanity in the Law of Moses, a covenant of Laws with mere earthly provisions. But this was also imbued with a strong symbolic framework of ritual, a parable of spiritual truth. It pointed to something far higher, to that place where Abraham stood before God in the Spirit Realm, a covenant of Spirit, not of Laws. That nation who received this covenant of Law was called to teach the Laws of God so all could know, to refresh the offer of earthly covenant. But they chose to keep it themselves, seeking to gain advantage for themselves over all humanity, summing all the mistakes of past epochs of human failure. They rejected God's constraints and ate the forbidden fruit, sought to tread on others as means to climb the tower of human accomplishment into God's presence, sought to gather power over all others, and became utterly lawless even as they clung to the mere form of Law. While their choice did not frustrate the plan of God to reveal Himself more fully through them, they chose to be a dead instrument, instead of a living member of His power.
All this is reflected in the story of Jonah. He was the first missionary God sent to Gentiles. There was a festering guilt over his nation's continual rejection of both Moses (Law) and Noah (Laws), along with a deep sense of fear what Assyria would someday do to the Northern Kingdom. Thus, Jonah refused to take the warning to them, hoping instead the wrath of God would destroy them utterly. After God forced the issue, Jonah obeyed his calling and preached in the city of Ninevah. He did not preach Moses, but Noah; Moses was for Israel only. Their sins were obvious, all stemming from a rejection of love and a preference for hatred. They repented, and God heard their cry for mercy. Jonah was infuriated, in part over the ease with which the Ninevites repented, compared to his own nation, the nation whom God had specifically chosen to bear His truth, but refused to live it themselves.
Jonah himself failed the test of love, and God helped him see that. It was that nationalist pride, that hubris to which men so quickly resort, which corrupted Jonah's heart and hindered his spiritual insight. Take a moment to notice the interplay between Spirit and Laws here. Jonah did not bring spiritual redemption to Ninevah, merely the earthly redemption of Laws. Yet, he was himself a spiritual man. Perhaps we can learn from Jonah the fundamental truth which we have so confused in our own times. The ultimate mission is spiritual birth. The method is the Laws.
God has always used Laws, and the Law, as the path to the Spirit. Fallen man is at war with God. To awaken consciousness of that condition requires Laws, a clear standard of God's demand on humanity. The first step is to awaken the awareness of sin, primarily by pointing out what sin is. We are not accountable for the response of the hearers, but only the message condemning sin. If that message is not carried on the wings of His love, it will go nowhere -- the message of Laws is love. The lessons of punishment are lost on those who do not know, and without love, there is no message to know. Once loving truth has done it's work, God grants to whom He wishes a hearing ear. Among those who hear and embrace that message, He also grants a birth of spirits. The path to the Spirit is through the conviction of sin, and the path through conviction of sin is His love working in us.
Jonah did not know how that green shade plant grew up there, nor did he anticipate the worm which cut it down. God chooses and acts well outside our knowledge, keeping His counsel on things we cannot possibly handle properly. We cannot pretend to manipulate the spiritual process, cannot pretend to control the results of our obedience in taking the message to the world. We have only that loyalty we can choose, that exertion of love, which is the message of Laws. Our greatest errors are in failing to understand what the Laws include, and presuming to choose for God how our love bears fruit.
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By Ed Hurst
14 May 2009
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