|---------------| | HELP WANTED: | | MORE PROPHETS | |---------------|
PUBLIC DOMAIN: Copyright declined by author at publication.
First edition July 2011
I am a prophet of Jehovah, the God of the Bible. I want to tell you what God requires on this earth. That does not say anything about you and your obligation to listen or act. It's simply a way of explaining why I am addressing you. You owe me nothing; if the message doesn't move you, pay no attention. If you need further explanation, ask as many questions as it takes to clarify. All I can offer is myself, in the hope whatever truth lives in me can show through. This is the prophet's ethic.
Starting with the title and the cover, everything in this book is merely a narrative of my soul. It's the best I know. The objective in writing is to provide a manual of instruction to help other prophets, and perhaps to help others who simply need some answers about the burning in their own souls.
If the message takes an anchor in your soul, you'll have to decide how to obey. I'll make suggestions according to my experiences. Use what fits; discard the rest and forge your own understanding. The mind is no more than the means to implement the imperatives of the Spirit of God speaking into your spirit. There is no orthodox theology aside from what is recorded in Scripture. All else is merely the efforts of humans to organize their thinking and their actions. You are not bound by anyone else's personal intellectual narrative of how they encountered God. The whole point is to deepen your commitment to God, calling you to do the work, to undertake the study which naturally flows from your desire to serve Him.
Everything on this human level of existence is no more than a good tool for that service. You can belong to any organization you like, but it falls to you alone standing before God to account for how you have invested the resources He has provided. It doesn't matter what material things you can claim to possess, so long as they do not possess you. You cannot serve God and the stuff of this life at the same time. When something no longer serves His purpose in Your life, throw it aside. That includes organizations and human affiliations of every type. Do not bind yourself by anything, or to anything, which you can name, point to or touch on this mortal plane.
That's a summary of my spiritual teaching. I assert without apology most Christians mix and confuse the spiritual and human planes, failing to separate between heavenly things and earthly things. What gets you into Heaven is the grace of God; what gets you right with God on the earth is fulfilling His Law Covenants. Grace trumps Laws, but often has you doing exactly what the Laws required. You can let grace inform your obedience here, but grace is not necessary to fulfill the Laws of God and gain the blessings of those Laws. Prophecy can surely serve a spiritual purpose, but it is a ministry of the Laws. This is my experience with God. Nothing here will serve well as an apologia for norming. Thus, I will not presume to debate or defend. That's God's territory. Read it or don't; review if it amuses you. I'll gladly answer questions and elaborate if something is unclear.
This study assumes the authority of the Scripture. It assumes you have read the whole Bible enough times to recognize phrases and content. There will be a few quotations, but this is not a Bible study guide. My personal preference is the Protestant Canon, but you'll have to work that out with God yourself. While I presume a certain spiritual receptivity in the reader, the nature of anything I can put into human language is merely intellectual content. Everything should be well within the reach of human intelligence alone. But because it presumes a higher realm, and is built entirely on written revelation from the Bible, you'll have to adjust your logical assumptions to fit that.
Right up front, we will be dealing with the question of Hebrew mystical logic versus Western Aristotelian epistemology. If you cannot acknowledge a source of input from beyond the five senses and reason, you will be wasting your time reading this. If you can cultivate a means to embrace something which comes to you from a non-rational source, a sort of intuition or subconscious processing, then at least some of this will make sense.
My fellow Christians are going to have to understand this stuff was working before Christ, and was based on covenants which His coming did not end. Granted, those covenants are best understood by knowing Christ, and He is the destination where everything was headed back when these covenants were the way God did things on the earth. Nonetheless, serving as a prophet is founded on principles which worked before He came and they work still. The Law of Moses is a closed covenant, but the Law of Noah is not closed. It still applies to all humanity until this earth is no more. We do study Moses as a particular example of Noah. Furthermore, you really don't understand Christ completely until you understand this first. This is the background behind everything He taught.
This in not about religion and spiritual birth, not about the Covenant of the Cross. The path of the prophet is understanding and obeying His commandments on the human level. A great many miracles and prophecies arose from simply obeying the applicable Laws of God, not necessarily because of some special spiritual awareness. There were prophets before Moses and we walk today in their craft. It should be obvious to anyone who has read the Bible, there has always been, and always will be, a great deal of divine activity on this level of existence, based on something other than being born-again. We are pointedly told spiritual birth is not for everyone. While the Laws do point to something on a higher level, His divine concern most certainly does affect life on this plane. If it happens on this level of existence, the Laws of God can address it, and things can be understood at least on this level by understanding His Laws.
Feel free to ask questions. This book is not about converting you to my religion. The final aim is to promote adherence to God's Laws. If you prefer to view that as cosmic moral absolutes, that's up to you. What you must understand is what I describe here does work; I have concrete results.
THIS BOOK IS PUBLIC DOMAIN. It would be contrary to the nature of this material to place it under any form of copyright. Distribute at will. It will be offered first in several different electronic formats. Those who wish to print it on paper or some other static media should be warned God is watching you. Charging more than what it costs to produce and distribute is a sin. Anyone wishing to translate into any other language needs no permission from me. Do your best; I won't presume to set limits. Obviously, it would be dishonest if you changed the words in English without noting in some obvious way you were the editor. Again, the nature of this material assumes God will notice and will act if anyone attempts to use this dishonestly. But this is not Scripture, and should not be treated as such.
What makes a prophet? What's the difference between a prophet and any other person? It's not what you might expect.
It burns. You look around you and it just burns. Things are wrong. Not just a little messed up, but monumentally wrong. It's so bad, even when it's right it's wrong. It hurts. Nothing takes away the pain, because it's not in your flesh, though it will produce some symptoms of physical discomfort. It comes from somewhere else. It keeps you awake at night, dims the light of the sun during the day, and provides a blackened and burnt smell to every delight in your world.
You could probably come up with other ways to express it, but there is a sense things are just wrong, and it's not just you. It includes you, of course, but you know it's something wrong all around you. Worse, it doesn't have to be that way. The relief is in reach, you know, even if you don't exactly know what it is. If you could just...
Somebody has to do something. It won't matter whether you consider yourself capable, talented, or whatever. You have a driving desire to understand this malaise and fix it. It's not simply about religion, either. This is something more immediate. The world could be better, has to be better, but everybody who claims to have the answer, or an answer, is barking up the wrong tree. No matter how many different things you try, every philosophy and every discipline of academia somehow falls short. None of them offer any real answers, and certainly none of them has any power to fix things. If they did, there would be a fix already, given the way so many people are trying.
You sense the anger of the universe itself, the world around you. But it's more than just anger, it's a deep sorrow. Is there some way to get in touch with that? Something tells you there is a way to restore peace and harmony, but nothing you've encountered does it. A thousand programs, books and conferences leave you somehow short of that thing which is always just beyond your reach.
You are called.
For the prophet, divine justice is the wellspring of all things. We could call it a hundred other things, since they are all just words plastered over something bigger than all our best words. God in Creation has woven a thread of His own Person into all things. It's not simply a standard, a body of laws, commandments, something you can simply memorize. Yet it is well within human reach, because it works entirely upon the human plane of existence. Nor is it religion, per se. It has a spiritual element, but does not require any particular religious experience. What it requires is simply that we recognize it sometimes defies the best of our human logic.
This justice we seek is a living thing. Like all living beings, it responds differently in every context. Embracing justice is not a simple matter of knowing, nor doing, but another category altogether. It is desire and commitment, a drive from just beyond the reach of our intelligence, beyond our control. The brain cannot own it, merely obey it. The brain must surely organize and formulate ways to fulfill the demands of justice, but cannot take the executive function. The decisions of justice are from a higher plane than mere intelligence, because they arise from something universal, something inherent in the moral fabric of the world you experience. We seek familiarity and friendship with justice, to serve justice as something which is far greater than any living human.
Your first intimation of justice knocks you on your face. If all you understand of that burning desire to fix the world is anger and indignation, then you don't get it. You are personally as powerless to do justice as you are to get justice. You are no less a transgressor than any other human. But you understand justice includes mercy; it's all in the same package. Justice isn't performance, but desire, and those who desire justice shall see mercy. You gratefully hold mercy to your breast and carry it to the world.
Mercy is not possible without repentance. Nobody can afford to really do justice, but we can reach for it, show our desire for it. We express in some way our desire to get loose from our broken natures, and justice recognizes that, offering mercy. The key to all good things on this earth is mercy. It's not a meritocracy, but something far more deeply personal.
From where we stand today, we look back over what seems a fairly long lived and mature civilization. There are a thousand philosophies with fancy names like existentialism, post-modernism, and so on. They appear to be a departure from the classical approach of the Enlightenment. Perhaps they are, but in at least one sense, they all still stand on the same foundation. The Enlightenment is simply a revival of the Ancient Classics, which included a lot of philosophy, particularly Roman and Greek philosophy. The difference is the Enlightenment is the birth of secularism, itself merely an extension of something hinted at in ancient Greece and Rome.
Indeed, if you boil it all down to what folks in the West actually do when they are at their best, the basis upon which they approach life, it all still derives from one Greek philosopher in particular, a fellow named Aristotle. Among all the other things he said and taught, there is one particular teaching for which he is noted, and it was his approach to knowing.
The fundamental question here is bound up in that fancy word, "epistemology." You can look it up and compare with my definition, but I'm going to focus on certain core concepts. It works like this: Aristotle was asking the question of how we should act in this world. That is, by what means do we understand reality such that our actions in this world work more or less predictably? Can we develop a reliable view of reality so we can study it and develop consistent expectations how various human activity will turn out?
Epistemology deals with the question of what we can know such that it's usable, as it were. What can I claim is true so that we can talk about it knowing it will work pretty much every time, for every person? Mankind has always sought control over his world, one way or another. It's one of the human instincts to want to shape our environment to suit our purposes. If we accept all sorts of inputs to our knowledge base without proper filtering, we might start believing stuff which can't be proved. Then we'll be wasting our resources on activities which don't do us much good, and might actually do harm. Of course, it involves plenty of discussion about what's good and useful, but that's part of the philosophical pursuit. Aristotle was all about establishing the frame of reference, giving such debate some firm foundation so it will have meaning.
Aristotle makes one assumption for which his native Greek culture is well known: If the best of men can't grapple with it using their intelligence, it's not important. Humanity in the ideal is the measure of all things. Indeed, if the answer cannot be arrived at from an entirely human-centered approach, it can't be valid. Aristotle felt this was largely self-evident. He did allow for things he didn't understand, but only under the assumption it had to be logical on his terms.
This is the reason virtually no one understands divine justice -- they exclude it from consideration before they start. You cannot know divine justice entirely from any study of sensory data and logic. At least, not using logic as Aristotle defined it. Divine justice is available only if you accept a form of logic which includes something beyond senses and intellect. To be a prophet requires you become comfortable crossing that barrier, reaching outside what science can prove. For an awful long time before Aristotle was around, people unanimously assumed a form of logic which included human faculties of knowing and deciding which aren't acceptable to modern science.
If you can't accept that assertion, you've already wasted too much time. You can't be a prophet without it.
It's a miracle. You do believe in miracles, don't you?
Miracles are those events from the hand of God which don't make sense, can't be accounted for in mundane terms of living on earth. But people in the Bible seemed far more comfortable with them, as if it was something they understood. We've lost that because we've lost mysticism. People get spooked at the mention of "mysticism." If you fear this word, you aren't ready to be a prophet. If you are able to mentally remove all the unhealthy associations from the term, we can demystify what this is all about. Mysticism simply describes a way of knowing things.
Recall we discussed the failure of the Western Aristotelian epistemology in the Introduction. The Ancient Hebrew people were fully aware of the rational approach, but knew instinctively it was not enough. If it were enough, we'd have more miracles and prophecies these days. It's not as if God has stopped working, but we have something which keeps us from getting into that part of the Kingdom of Heaven. People manage to exercise faith and it seems like such an amazing breakthrough only because we don't usually step into the part of our existence where faith and miracles are the norm. It's okay to stick to the analytical scientific method when there is nothing else, but if there is something else, we are obliged by God to take a look. The fundamental assumption of being a prophet is there is something else, and it's not obvious when using only our sensory and logical capacities. There is this thing called "revelation" which comes from God, and we have to account for this first and foremost, before we use any other means of deciding how we shall proceed in this life.
Obeying God's revelation does follow more or less the scientific method, in one sense. Your conscious mind takes revelation and obeys it, formulating what it takes in practical terms to get as close as you can. Making sense of that revelation cannot take place entirely in the conscious mind. There is a part of your soul which is outside the boundaries of conscious intellect. Science itself recognizes most of us are aware of only some 10-15% of what we can process. The rest is murky territory to science because science is forced to reject the only source of information we have about that other 85-90% of our processing capability. We know things are processed there because of dreams and sudden impressions which do not arise from conscious thinking. At a very minimum, a properly functioning intuition comes from there. Intuition is processing something by patterns you have absorbed, and don't require fully conscious engagement. Intuition is just outside the line of conscious thought, and is quite effective if you cultivate it. But there is much more, and revelation is processed there in the same realm.
The happy part of this is, provided you are able to suspend your Western bias and resistance to this whole question, no one has to convince you. Once you are open to the truth, either truth becomes self-evident. If this part of you is alive and functioning, it will absorb the truth of what I write here. This is an example of how revelation works. While transmitted through conscious means of communication, such communication is merely the channel for a content which is much more than the words and thoughts. Revelation is not about information, but a direct impression from God, a very personal communion. Your intellect is simply not able to handle any part of that, so your non-conscious faculty does it.
People who wall off that faculty have a real problem with being a Christian, and an equally tough time grasping God's Laws and how they apply. The Bible was written by people who presumed the reader was acquainted with mysticism, and their writings could not have made sense without it. Those writings do not make much sense today without it. When you read the writings, you must absorb them in that off-conscious faculty and process them there, or you will be missing the actual content. So when you read it, that other faculty recognizes things your conscious mind cannot. The same goes with any human writing which conveys truth, including this writing. The ability to recognize God's truth is not tied up in hitting all the right logical points, nor thrilling your mind with some compelling logical clarity, but something much more subtle, and frankly above the intellect.
If the preceding does not ring a bell of recognition somewhere off the center stage of your conscious thoughts, then I can't help you, and this manual will mean very little. Mysticism is simply embracing non-conscious means of processing and absorbing truth which is too complicated for mere intellect. Mysticism is not about the content, but the way of handling it. Only since the time of Aristotle have any significant number of humans not been mystics. This includes most of Hebrew history and all of Hebrew Scripture. If you don't embrace mysticism as the Hebrews did, nothing in the Old Testament will make much sense to you. If you do embrace mysticism, the Old Testament can be entirely clear and consistent. The core of consistency is outside the conscious mental processes.
Don't confuse this with emotions, which only appear to be in the subconscious. A critical element in learning God's Laws and serving as a prophet is understanding where emotions come from, and what purpose they serve in life here below. Emotions are simply the link between the body and the mind, the results of flesh and intellect interacting. We have been falsely taught by Western epistemology to confuse mysticism and emotions, but they aren't at all the same. Time will teach you the difference once you grasp the distinction.
Let's examine how we can get out of this mess.
Whatever man can know about God and His Laws is found in the person of Jesus Christ. He is God's Law.
In our Western intellectual culture, saying things that way is referred to as "anthropomorphism" -- ascribing human traits to something which is supposedly not human. The problem is the Hebrew culture which gave birth to Jesus would say that stands truth on its head. They would say Western culture depersonalizes and objectifies God. To the Ancient Hebrew mystical mind, God is Truth and Truth is God. Truth cannot be perceived as something which exists separate from God's Person. When Scripture says "God is love" that's not a figure of speech so much as symbolic logic. I have already offered an explanation in the previous chapter which views justice as a living thing, and this is an entirely Hebrew approach. Saying Jesus was the personification of God's Law is a Western statement; it presumes Law must be an object, a thing, an intellectual ideal. To say He is God's justice is a Hebrew statement, which signals that justice cannot be understood, much less applied to life, without knowing Him as a human being.
Jesus while He lived never directly condemned Aristotle. What He did say simply assumes Aristotle was not reliable. If you cling to Aristotle, you cannot understand Jesus. Jesus condemned the Jewish leadership of His day for embracing Aristotle, and departing from the ancient ways of Moses. (Bible scholars refer to Aristotle's influence under the broader term "Hellenism.") He contrasted what God had said through Moses with what they were saying was the Law. A little known secret even today is the Jews already had something we now call the Talmud. In Jesus' day that was an oral body of interpretation of the Law using Aristotle's epistemology. He called that body of oral material "the traditions of the elders" -- a merely human set of concepts versus the revelation of God. It was clear Jesus dismissed this body of human traditions as contrary to revelation, a subtle form of attack on God's Laws. They executed Him for that. Their Aristotelian approach had turned Law into empty legalism, had excused their greed and abuse, sucking the life out justice. They had it all figured out and anything contrary was "evil."
This shift away from the Ancient Hebrew intellectual culture, which includes mysticism, began during the time Alexander the Great ruled Palestine (roughly 300 BC). Nothing in the history of Judaism has corrected this, so modern Jews are Talmudic, not Mosaic. They were not content with killing Jesus, though. They slipped around behind all the Apostles seeking to reassert their Talmudic approach over the new churches. We call those Judeo-Christian evangelists "Judaizers." It was a major controversy in many of Paul's letters, though he did not use that label for them. He fought them throughout his apostolic ministry. Sad to say, they eventually won. The Western Christian churches of today are essentially Talmudic in their approach to Scripture. Instead of the Talmud of Judaism, we have Systematic Theology. Instead of a subtle Hebrew mystical approach, we have rational literalism. Insisting we have to honor Aristotle's epistemology as we read Scripture is nothing more than modern Pharisaism in the church.
This study is covered in much more detail in Western Civilization Is Not Christian. The point is for you as a prophet to realize most of the Western church is not a friend of your calling.
There is one more issue to deal with here: false mysticism. Among those who claim to embrace mysticism are Western mystics. What they promote is simply more of the same thing, a deeper rational logic, a higher grade of reason. Because it's fake, it becomes a caricature of mysticism, serving to discredit the whole thing. A related problem is the tendency to push things in Christianity into this fake mystical territory. That is, they paint ideas with an aura of false piety and false holiness so that it becomes sacred and untouchable. Thus, certain institutions exempt themselves from accountability to God's Laws and seek to avoid the prophet's piercing gaze. This is closely associated with an empty, exteralized grade of fake holiness, and a boat load of self-righteous indignation for those who don't take them seriously. Let's be clear: All human activity, all human organizations, are subject to God's Laws. His justice applies to the churches and every person, regardless of titles and positions. Nothing on this plane of existence is exempt from His Laws.
Modern Western Christianity inhibits genuine prophetic ministry. How can we begin to restore the ancient faith?
The early churches in Judea were predominately Judean; they were mostly Hebrew people. They organized themselves in Hebrew ways, as they had done for centuries. Their social structure was as yet largely unchanged from ancient times, though already under attack from the Pharisees. That structure was the extended family household. The first churches in Jerusalem were reconstituted clans. If a new member was the head of his household, it was common for his whole family, however much was under his authority, to come with him. It had nothing to do with folks being "born-again;" this was a matter of God's Laws in their eyes. They understood how God intended for it to work. The churches were clans formed under the tribal leadership of Jesus, obeying His Laws. He was the King.
In those times it was common for people in one city to belong to different nations, and to be under the partial jurisdiction matching their national identity. One of the primary issues for Roman soldiers making an arrest is whether the prisoner was to be turned over to his own national magistrate, and whether there was one in that location. The Christians viewed Jesus as the rightful ruler of Judea and Jews, and maintained a rival social structure which they believed restored the ancient ways of God. The priests were replaced by the Apostles, but the ruling elders were recognized according to ancient tribal customs. That's because everyone knew such was what God required. The first fracas within the church required appointing elders who would adopt those in Jerusalem who lived away from their blood kin. Those seven Greek-speaking elders were the new heads of household for those who came from Greek-speaking lands, to make sure the system took care of them. The Apostles insisted the system not be broken, but extended in new ways. God's Laws presumed such a social structure, and no nation on earth had any other structure back when He first revealed His Laws at the dawn of human history.
The Gentile churches were held to a similar standard. The only Scripture at that time was what we call the Old Testament. The Apostles were engaged in full time research of these Scriptures, but reading them in light of Jesus' teachings, and peeling off the layers of falsehood from the Talmud. When the Gentile churches began struggling with the old Hebrew ways, everyone got together and discussed what had to be carried over as essential, and what was merely peculiar to Hebrew people. We have a bare outline of that in Acts 15, but in Paul's letters to the various churches, we see him pressing certain customs not mentioned in that outline. Obviously a certain amount of Hebrew ways were required universally. A few were reversed: Jewish men wore hats in worship; Christians did not. But women all wore a head covering, and folks wore a style of modest clothing. Churches met in the fashion of synagogues, with women and children separate from the men and older boys. And churches were organized as little Hebrew clans, with elders over their households within the churches.
The church cannot speak God's Laws to society at large if it does not first obey God's Laws. The task of discerning, of abstracting from the Bible what applies to us, cannot proceed from the Western assumptions, but must begin with the Hebrew assumptions. Fashions change, and wearing a veil is purely symbolic, but that doesn't remove the obligation to find a modern application. Western churches aren't even trying to understand the Laws, but are seeking escape clauses, and excuses to stick to their Aristotelian logic. What we end up with is the church simply aping fallen society, ignoring God's Laws as irrelevant. The churches mirror the secular society around them, so why should secular society do anything different?
It's not the Laws which need to be justified, but every departure from them.
What are some contrasts which help us as prophets begin to absorb the justice of God? What follows is an update of something I wrote a few years back.
First is the previously mentioned business of intellectual frame of reference. Ultimate truth is revealed; we do not construct our view of reality starting with ourselves and our reason. Hebrew logic -- the prophet's logic -- is symbolic, not analytical. That is more than mere allegory and metaphor; symbols are flexible and morph with the context. Symbols are more about character and power. Analysis is more interested in the nature of something, as if objective reality actually exists and really matters. Hebrew logic is far more fuzzy, contextual. The objective is not to know something, as if to establish ownership through mastery. We don't seek to settle the matter once and for all as scientifically verified. In Hebrew mysticism we seek to assess only how something can be used at any given point in time.
Life is all about communication. We don't convey data; we present an impact. Communication is transporting the listener to the context of the narrative, bringing the fullness of the event to life for them. We want them to be shaped by a fresh encounter with God. Hebrew language is a collection of symbols, each a statement of impact, often rather dramatic. Hebrew vocabulary is tiny, with some 800 root words. They synthesize bigger words from the roots, and the meaning always shifts with the context. The intended result is that the receiver of the message be moved to ponder the meaning, not simply memorize it and file it away. We aren't building a static frame or matrix, but growing a tree. If you aren't contemplative, you can't have wisdom. Life is not knowing things, and learning is not merely knowing more. Life is obeying, and learning is obeying more thoroughly, bringing ever greater satisfaction to God.
Hebrew Scripture makes reference to the heart, not as the place of feelings, but of the will or commitment. We can academically divide the soul into mind, will and emotions. Hebrew thought places emotions in the belly, a matter of appetites. The intellect is fairly obvious, but Western assumptions ignore the will as a separate faculty. As you seek to become more Hebraic, you'll find your mind fights being removed from the executive. It seeks to rule the will, which is backwards. The will is the sum total of your commitments, and the only conscious link to the non-conscious. The power of God's revelation in some indefinable way invades the non-conscious portion of our souls. It carries down to the will as imperatives, a driving necessity to serve. God does not speak to the intellect because His voice is not mere data, but something far more substantial, yet indefinable in terms of intellect. The will conceives a burning drive, a commitment which pull on every particle of our being. This what Hebew Scripture means by the heart, the seat of the will.
The brain is supposed to take this commitment and implement what it requires in whatever context it recognizes. We can characterize the process of moral development as the battle to put the mind in its proper place, training the mind to more clearly discern the will, and the will being shaped by unseen forces in the non-conscious. That's about as clinical as it gets. The intellect rightfully serves as the pilot, and your will as the captain of the ship. The will takes orders from a higher command. The will is your character, God's unique stamp on your life, and must of necessity be different from every other human you encounter. It is in the will, the heart, where you discover the call to prophetic ministry. The will does not change so much as we simply discover more of it.
Everything is a mission, and everyone serves some higher authority. God portrays Himself as an eastern nomadic potentate, a desert sheik. He has the authority to declare you family, but all of Creation serves Him one way or another, whether as slave or with a direct interest in the family business. He gets His way, but we are permitted to know His will as Laws and cooperate willingly. His Laws are simply His desire. They are consistent with His eternal character, and this is a matter of getting acquainted with so much of His character as He reveals, but He reveals it based on our commitment to His pleasure. Things don't have to make sense to us; they make sense to Him. It's our privilege to understand some of what makes sense and why, but our duty is to obey whether we understand or don't. It will seem at first rather capricious from the Western frame of reference, but the fault is with our understanding. When we put Aristotle in his place as a mere mechanic, and embrace the intellectual climate in which our God chose to reveal Himself, divine logic begins to assert itself, and obedience comes naturally.
When we discard the lesser brand of human logic, events around us make more sense, too. We can detect a moral significance in things mere reason cannot imagine. Deciding when to accept circumstance and when to fight our fate follows the same divine logic. Success is not measured in terms of performance, but in terms of desire. Dying while trying is not a waste if struggling against what seems impossible is the mission. Nor is this a reference to Western notions of the noble sacrifice. That has its place, but only when arrived at from the proper Hebrew logic. Revelation is the whole point, and for us as prophets, it's the revelation of God's character as Law. His personal approval is the whole objective, and no other standard counts. Human measurements of effectiveness and achievement are hardly pertinent, whether they happen to agree with revelation or not.
The most difficult issue is that of authority and how it is delegated. It is entirely Person to person. You may be familiar with the phrase, "in the Lord's name." Almost no one seems to understand that means you are the personal representative of God in some particular mission. You have come to reveal His desire to someone. Your personal desires are impertinent. You may have been granted a certain amount of latitude based on your assessment upon arrival within the context, or as the context changes. However, the entire matter is the desire of God for His justice to prevail. You will as prophet spend some time reshaping yourself to accurately convey His sense of justice. You don't lose your personality; you discover what it should have been in the first place. Your apprenticeship ends when your accuracy reaches a level which pleases God. You will know.
No one can explain how you will know, but we can associate certain things with it. You will have learned not to take yourself seriously. Being made to appear a fool hardly registers, except as a mere fact within the context of your mission. Even if nothing at all changes, you walk away with that burning sense of injustice replaced with the assurance you could do no more, no different. And you walk away completely free. Free to go back when it seems appropriate by God's character, and free to disentangle yourself because you fulfilled all obedience. You know you revealed justice, and you are at peace with the mission.
More is difficult to put in words, but I can offer some ideas which will move you closer to what a prophet must be.
God is the greatest psychiatrist ever, fixing all your psychic wounds. At the same time, He wastes no effort on things do not need resolving. He knows. Some things are common to our human lot, and won't be resolved. God alone decides, but there are some things which should be obvious.
Here are some concrete ways to break the old habits of mind in order to be a prophet:
You are not the anchor, but the anchor is within you. Find it. Explore it in detail, often. You have to know yourself exceedingly well, and apply justice first to yourself. The process never ends, but you won't get started prophesying before God is happy with your commitment and progress.
To prevent confusion, I want to note how I use certain specific terms:
To what shall we liken God's justice? How do we express it so we can begin to sense what our calling and service should mean? We will use the Parable of the Court of God's Justice. Think of it in terms of ANE courts, not the modern ones of Western democratic law.
There is one Legislator and Judge, God Almighty. More than a petty king, He is a great emperor of all Creation. His legislation is not law, per se, but legal policy. Any expression of His policy becomes law in effect, but the underlying plan of justice cannot possibly be restricted to any written record. It's most clear and full expression was in the Person of Jesus Christ the man. Whatever it was He did and said is God's justice. There is no conflict of interest, as anything He desires is justice by definition.
There are essentially two lawyers: Christ and Satan, Defense and Prosecutor in that order. The latter is most likely to cheat and fudge on the rules when he can get away with it. The humans involved are partly responsible for enforcing those rules (for recognizing deception). The former is unfailingly correct at all times. However, when presenting cases before the Judge, it is possible to lose. It usually happens when the accused has not availed himself of God's provisions for mercy. That is justice.
The bailiff, guards, and officers of the Court are angelic beings, either angels of the Lord or demons. For the most part, demons are the prison guards, as it were. However, as prophet, you will have angelic court officers with you at all times. It helps to bear that in mind, regardless of human perception.
The prophet is the Court Crier. This is more complicated than it seems, because you are the Court Reporter who doesn't use stenography equipment. The justice of God itself cannot be written; it must be absorbed in the character of the prophet. It is written on the heart. You observe and absorb justice into yourself, then render a summons, decision, or whatever means of publication the Court desires. You don't write Scripture, but you notify interested parties of how justice will affect them. Angels may be on hand to provide some immediate enforcement, but that's not typical. You'll know. They protect your mission, but not necessarily your person. Sometimes a critical element in the case is how the interested parties respond to your report. There is a high probability you will die while on mission. However, you must learn to regard death as a mere circumstance in the grand scheme of things.
Finally, the time scale is incomprehensible on a human plane. The Court itself stands outside human space. Our sense of time is actually a part of the Fall's curse. Time as a factor simply does not apply in God's court. He is aware of it, but not bound by it. But rarely does God declare something with a reference to time as we recognize it. Most of God's justice is conditioned by sequence of events, by a meeting of conditions whenever that may be. One of the most demanding tasks of the prophet is ignoring the clock sense. Your flesh, including your mind, will refuse to surrender that, but your mind can be disciplined to accept the command "wait."
This is probably one of the best ways to mentally frame the calling of prophet.
This is not theology, nor religion as most people think of it. This is Laws, justice, the simple matter of reality. This is how things work on this lower plane of existence.
Absorbing God's justice is hard enough. Characterizing it becomes very challenging without a specific context. Scripture itself does not often attempt explaining general principles directly. Typically we find parables, symbolic statements, or narratives of applying His justice in concrete examples. Sometimes it works well simply to show how modern law contradicts His justice.
It's no accident the Law begins with God as Creator of all things. It establishes His ownership, His ultimate authority. It also establishes His interest, depicting Him as a mother hen brooding over Creation like a nest of hatchlings. God is both mother and father, but most often portrays Himself as Heavenly Father. You can call Him "Dad" quite correctly, but the concept of Father is far more than that. In ANE terms it implies a whole raft of unquestioned legal authority, but notice how completely things hinge on family ties. Herein is an implied covenant, a burden of responsibility. If you breathe and move, you are obliged to recognize there is a Creator.
The second significant legal principle is the Fall. People would love to ignore this, forget it, bury it. Any and all human behavior which does not acknowledge the Fall is unlawful. All human rule-making which does not account for the Fall is illegitimate. Any agenda which presumes to improve the human condition by altering some basic fact of human nature is morally wrong, in that it at least implies a rejection of God's ownership, His authority to say what shall be. The implications are vast, but in our day and age, there is a primary issue we should address.
Inherent in our fallen condition is a measure of pain and suffering. Death and misery are routine. You cannot presume to stay His sovereign hand by coming up with all these rules, regulations, and great piles of safety equipment. A certain amount of fatalism is required under God's justice. Where we go wrong the other way is when we become too casual about the sufferings of others, by refusing to taken even small measures to reduce human suffering and death. The most amazing array of creative excuses are offered for killing our human empathy instinct.
The most sickening madness is building an overly safe womb environment for other adults. It starts with a godlike presumption that one's own sense of comfort should be universally adopted, by force if necessary. It won't matter the specifics of their proposal, the motive and manner makes it unjust. Without fail the question arises when someone projects their private fantasy of a perfect world on God, and are eager to use every evil oppression to enforce it. If they can't use God as an excuse, perverting His revelation, they simply refuse to acknowledge Him at all. Skepticism, even cynicism, regarding any human expertise regarding what's really best for people is a godly prophetic tool.
God requires people to tolerate each other. The difference between a civil society and one which is merely just is simply the matter of increasing population density. You can have justice without civility, but only if there aren't many people near you. Civility is an expression of justice. Thinking in terms of rights is backwards to God's justice, introducing absolutes in contexts where justice requires flexibility. The idea behind civility is staying inside your own fair share of space, a share which varies widely with the situation. It's mostly about keeping your words and actions from spilling over onto others as if those others don't matter, inflating some minor personal issue into a social imperative. This goes back to recognizing everyone is fallen, including the person in the mirror. Justice means you don't take yourself and your needs too seriously. Don't project; don't transform your petty wishes into basic human rights.
When things get tight, someone has to be in charge. Good moral people prefer to mind their own business, and don't want to rule. People eager to lead are morally unqualified, possessed of some fatal character flaw such that power is like a drug or god. A fundamental requirement for God's justice is government, but all governments are held accountable to that justice.
A key element in human grasp of God's justice is recognizing roles and what comes with them.
Privilege does not attach to persons individually, but to roles and responsibilities. A given individual may wear numerous hats, taking on different roles in a fluid shift of responsibilities. In a matter of seconds two people can completely reverse their relative position in society based on what attaches to each role. One of the greatest evils of Western civilization is the natural tendency of vesting respect for the role into the person. This is simply evil. Virtue does not arise from popular acclaim, nor talent or any other inherent human trait, imaginary or otherwise, but arises from knowing where your role-based privileges end.
One of the most pernicious and persistent lies you will fight as a prophet manifests itself as popular insistence this or that person is beyond inspection or reproach. It won't matter what excuse the followers gives, because the real reason is they hope to absorb some of that faux glory for themselves, along with the perquisites, by attaching themselves to the train of the this sacred person's mantle. It's simply an excuse to oppress and rob everyone who isn't part of the inner circle.
Just government begins in the home. Your immediate ruler appointed by God is the head of your household. Granted, God intended people should live in extended family social groups, but most of us will never see that. The underlying principle remains; the parental head of the household is responsible to God for guidance, sacrificial care, and seeking the welfare of the others. Not everyone who rises to such a role can also rise to the character requirements, but in this fallen world, somebody has to have the veto when decisions have to made immediately for whatever reason. Whether your head of household is exemplary or an insufferable ogre is simply the human variation after the Fall. The Bible provides sufficient precedent for dealing with those variations justly.
The basic principle remains for so long as the earth exists: No authority figure should affect your daily existence who isn't related by blood or marriage. Whatever flaws arise from this system are no excuse for departure. No human is permitted to propose their own designer universe. This is what God says is the best possible for our world. Here we take the most controversial stand, because it is the most intractable failure of Western governments: The minor child is entirely the responsibility of the household. Civil government outside the extended family getting involved in child welfare issues is an abomination to God. This alone justifies God eventually destroying a nation, because it violates such a fundamental Law of God, rather like spitting in His face.
The remedy is the same for almost all social evils. The extended family is responsible before God to get involved and stay involved. Each extended family must discern for themselves the proper degree of activism versus laissez-faire. As the family relations widen farther into larger circles of community, the links weaken, but never disappear. That's because there is an inherent hierarchy of authority. There is head of household, elder over several households of close kin, and eventually clan chief and tribal chief. Quaint and primitive it may be, but this is the government and social order God's Laws presume. It is not stated because the narrative of Scripture regards this as painfully obvious, and the writers could not have foreseen the unconscionable departure from it except as flagrant rebellion against God.
Part of this assumption is the only person who can possibly exercise sufficient care to rule justly is someone who has blood ties. A tremendous amount of God's justice is tied up in that. This is a powerful human instinct. People seldom consciously consider whether they owe any allegiance to their blood kin; they simply act on it.
Thus, the power to use physical force is tied to kinship. The first person to compel a child to obey is a parent, shaping the child's expectations for reality. The first person to respond to any real threat is the same parent, who uses even more force to protect than they would to correct. There is an instinctive bond between these two uses of force; a child will respect a spanking from someone who displays the power to keep them safe. In God's eyes, this alone justifies the use of coercive power. No other basis exists for exercising authority in God's justice.
Thus, your basic social defense and police force are village tough guys, presumably your cousins and uncles. In practice, it falls to every man to be ready and able to contribute to the defense of the extended family community. Thus, it is the responsibility of some elder in the village to organize weapon distribution and training. Only those willing to face danger on your behalf can be your policemen.
Perhaps by this point you realize why humans cannot easily mix. Silly notions about cosmopolitan fruit salads ignore thousands of years of human history, not to mention God's revelation. The instinctive binding of blood kinship cannot be replaced. Only in the most extraordinary circumstances can it be emulated by those dedicated to building ties, and then roles, which approximate God's original intent.
For all the popular orthodoxy in the Post-Modern West seeking to denigrate it, the tribal social structure is what God demands. Except for scattered enclaves where such a tribal community already exists in the West, we are stuck with geographical fragmentation of kinship. God has not left us with no alternative path, but the path is narrow and rough.
The first major limitation is maturity. Children in general are not ready for mixing without a great deal of guidance and structure, and extensive modeling by their parents. It seems tiresome to face the outright lying by propagandists that children aren't born racist. If you carefully build the environment of your scientific experiments, and selectively filter out those who don't fit the imaginary ideal, and ignore evidence contrary to your thesis when it shows, you'll be able to produce all sorts of studies showing kids aren't conscious of blood kinship. Humans are born with an instinct for distrusting outsiders, arising from the imprinting of the parents. Skin and hair color are hardly significant factors; it's all a matter of whom the child learns is rightly part of their world or not. In a normal world, it will always be their own relatives by blood. At various stages of development, different portions of the exclusionary mechanism manifest. This is the way God made us, and the burden of responsibility falls to parents, not children, to decide.
Distrust is a human instinct. It's hardwired by God's design, because mankind is fallen and can't be trusted. Prejudice is nothing more than instinct informed by parental transmission. Prejudice itself is a simple fact of life; morality attaches to whether it serves or hinders God's justice, not its mere existence. Whatever your childhood experience, only as an adult are you permitted to rewrite parental influences. As already noted, it's no one's business what parents teach their own children, except for those closest to the parents by kinship.
At what point do we expect children to be more malleable? It varies with all sorts of factors, but Scripture indicates certain signal role shifts on flexible milestones with age approximations. Most of it has to do with God's idea of when a human is ready in broad terms for this or that new responsibility.
Children are weaned when mama says so. In ANE cultures that varied between the appearance of teeth and the fifth year. The point is the mother decides, accounting for whatever factors, when a child is ready to begin learning their gender role in society, which generally coincides with weaning. Prior to that, they are treated with virtually no gender differentiation. But somewhere near start of the fifth or sixth year, boys and girls begin sexual segregation. The boys let go of the apron strings and start hanging out with the men and older boys, while girls play less and start learning domestic management.
Literacy doesn't begin in earnest until eight or nine. Modern behavioral science recognizes this as the point where a child's own interest in whatever passes for formal education takes off. In the ANE culture, this is when children begin to read their scripture texts. The reason is so around age twelve they become vested with their first legal responsibilities. In more brutal terms, until age nine they can be killed without much social scandal; the loss is entirely that of the family. At age twelve it becomes a crime, because the wider village society has taken a loss. The child has become a legal person because they are capable of carrying some of the burdens of the Laws.
This is also when they are not simply permitted, but expected to learn about adult responsibilities. No one pretends they'll just buy into everything they are handed. Character is a precious commodity, and they are expected to challenge much of what they are told. It's viewed as necessary, and leadership includes the expectation of being ready to answer those challenges. Children are guided through rejection and rebellion with the intent they form their own covenant with reality, their own covenant with God. It is far less pronounced in girls largely because of instincts arising from different hormones. God intends their primary covenant with the world is with their husbands.
Young manhood is the time for bearing the more mundane burdens of the community. Strength of body and of character are developed in repeating burdensome tasks which reflect future responsibilities. They are the runners, the fetchers and carriers, often the personal servant for whomever guides their apprenticeship. It's their job to learn what constitutes a threat to the community and sound the alarm, whether in the dramatic attacks of animals and warriors, or things more subtle. They are seldom the first force to confront a threat, though, because they aren't expected to be competent until somewhere close to age thirty. Thus, they are shield bearers, even if only symbolically.
Young womanhood is more about building the nest. She is an apprentice, too, but hers is much shorter because she matures more quickly in her role than do boys. She'll marry as soon as her parents decide, which should be rather earlier than Westerners like. An age disparity between husband and wife of a decade or more is actually wired into human behavior. It's a cultural perversion we expect age parity. Frankly, widows who outlive their older husbands are a critical asset to the community, in communities which understand God's justice.
That there are variations to this primitive tribal model is to be expected, even in ancient times. Since humanity began, there have been ways of binding people to each other in the absence of blood kinship. Scripture refers to this as covenant. The modern contract is impersonal, binding resources and actions. Covenants are utterly personal, binding people into roles. The nature of the covenant carries natural limitations, but covenants for the sake of community building are more likely permanent. You can grouse about being saddled with blood relations who are difficult, and there are provisions for unilaterally dissolving certain responsibilities to them. But when you freely choose to covenant with someone, only by the same freedom can it be dissolved. Thus, divorce for example is nearly forbidden. It is regarded as an extraordinary measure for extraordinary problems. In general, only infidelity justifies it, because that constitutes a unilateral and unjust violation. God forbids offering or taking sexual release outside the marriage covenant, period. I note here Jesus shot down the Mosaic exemptions as not what God really had in mind. God takes covenants seriously because all of them are sworn in His Presence.
It becomes necessary here to dispel a false image about ANE family home life. Women were not simply kept barefoot, pregnant and out sight. Granted, Scripture takes a very realistic view of male sexual urges by requiring a strong social barrier between the sexes very early. Starting at around age six, and increasing in strictness through age ten, boys and girls not closely related are forbidden each other's company, except by accident and necessity. The physical barriers vary with cultural requirements, but the basic principle is guys can't be trusted to resist feminine charms, regardless whether the female wants his attention or not. In most ANE societies, it was on the men to avoid speaking to an unrelated female in public. However, given that basic assumption, women were actually managers of the household as a whole. This accounts for narratives of women in business, because within social protocols for separation, people still had to trade, and sex roles overlapped a great deal in the public marketplace. Further, women could serve as elders over the household and clan, and in the New Testament church. It was only in the actual priesthood or other spiritual leadership where women are forbidden. Even there, women had roles which brought them close to the office.
As we scale upward in the size of the community, more and more roles are based on covenant and less on blood kinship. What must be never forgotten is that covenant ties are even more binding than blood, and the burden of accountability to God is much higher.
We note in passing the previous lesson reflects God's ideal for both civil society and church. In essence, the church displaces previous human associations, and becomes your de jure clan on this earth, your covenant family. Thus, church organization which departs from this ideal is not valid in God's eyes. Western church leaders would like to ignore this fact, and we as prophets can't let it slide.
That doesn't mean God will hate them, and can't use them for His spiritual agenda. It means they aren't lawful. They'll be missing the power of God's justice as a reliable resource. This is what matters most to the prophet. We can't shut out the sense of justice, the burning drive to maximize and optimize the harvest of blessings from the Laws. Grace may well accomplish some of that by itself, but only because grace inevitably leads people to justice. We seek to raise a conscious awareness of this bounty.
But we are equally likely to be given commissions to address civil governments at all levels. The previous lesson is more than enough fodder for days and days of prophetic denunciations of modern society and governments. On the one hand, we know this is God's justice. On the other hand, we realize there are realistic turning points, degrees of compliance, and particular issues in which we are provoked by God to point out incremental improvements. God's wrath will fall, but His mercy is measured by desire, not performance. We address our evil world by calling for a change of heart, because that is the limit of our authority in the role as prophet. Anything more we do by way of miracles requires knowing God has sent along angelic enforcers for that very purpose. For the most part, this is all about raising awareness at the point they are most likely to get a clue. We seek to understand in those terms our commissions to prophecy.
Certain increments of compliance are painfully obvious. Within a given civil and social context, there will always be the oppression issue of the day, so to speak. Some things are so egregious, they warrant a high degree of denunciation, to the point we get ourselves in hot water. It need not mean arrest and prosecution, but inevitably we are kicking someone's sacred cow. At the same time, Western churches are constantly chasing ghosts of false justice. Don't trust in so-called Christian political agendas. If we as prophets fail to discern how justice truly applies, we will put our hands to false prophecy.
At this time of general decline in human social development globally, there are precious few communities whom God would permit to literally shut us up justly if we prophesy falsely. Jesus died for the truth, and we should not expect any better treatment for telling the truth. It may well be you alone will know whether your message really was from God. The issue is not whether it is received, and who else may approve or support us. Standing justified as a prophet before God, we should expect to make almost everyone angry at one time or another. Given my experience, I would warn you: Precious few people, including our fellow prophets, are going to applaud your pronouncements if any part of your path is close to mine. Get used to it. You need no man's approval, only peace with God. Yet this is also what makes us cautious. We keep our mouths shut until we can't any more, because if we are going to rile up everyone around us, it must be justified before God.
As you narrow down your message, more tightly addressing concrete specifics, you are in the most dangerous territory. You can easily become too glib and casual about this and it will hurt you. God will withdraw His power from your ministry, and your sense of assurance would then be entirely artificial, man-made. The consequences may have nothing to do with how long or comfortably you live, but the actual power itself in your prophecy will die. If this does not register with you as having the ultimate importance, nothing I write will be of any use to you. No human can fake this. Applying the message of God's justice to human government actions requires a devotion only God Himself can build in you.
We seek to undermine the legitimacy of Satan's claims over this world. He does hold an awfully powerful writ of attorney, but it is hardly limitless. When you are operating in the full authority of God's justice, Satan's hands are tied. This is simply the facts of our universe, and our plane of existence. We seek to expose that truth.
Civil government arose with a very limited purpose.
It won't matter what historians and archaeologists say, God describes the initial ideal society as semi-nomadic over a relatively small range, herding small animals, gathering edible wild food, and cultivating seasonal crops. As the original family grew through several generations, the same elder remained vigorous for an awfully long time. The world was a different place then, but more importantly, they had the full advantage of God's justice and all the promises attached. Things went downhill, and at some point God destroyed all but one human family starter set. This time there was a dramatic change in climate and topography, and nature becomes far less hospitable. But according to the Covenant of Noah, obeying the basic laws already known from even more ancient times would ensure a cycle of seasons with stable and predictable patterns. Thus, man keeps social order on his part, and God keeps natural order on His part. Later oral tradition indicates some likely provisions of Noah's Law, and it seems consistent. You can read more about the Covenant of Noah in Studies in the Laws of Noah.
Normal human existence under God's Laws requires keeping a social order. If all you have is three or four generations of the same family in your village, this is pretty easy. As more generations are added, even if the first bunch are still alive, it gets more complicated quickly. Soon, the original tribe is broken into several clans and spreads to multiple villages because there isn't room for primitive living all in one place. With the rise of more culture and technology, whatever that may be, comes a demand for greater concentrations of wealth, plus the means to pursue it. When it becomes important, people will develop the social skills necessary to live in large numbers close together (AKA civilization). The market becomes bigger and denser, and folks specialize more, become more efficient. Social order gets even more complicated, because the rules necessary to be fair and just before God have to apply to ever more complicated situations. But notice one thing: It all revolves around staying alive first, then being more comfortable.
As more stuff is stockpiled in more concentrated storage, it becomes a tempting target to predators of all kinds. Animals seldom organize their attack, but humans are another matter. The first king was no more than a warlord, someone to organize and keep a valid defense against human attacks. As threats become persistent and varied, the occasional warlord has to stay on the job. With this job comes the concern for making defense more efficient, and everything else with it. And who wants to surrender all that power and privilege just because the enemy is taking a long holiday?
Thus, civil government is born. It is an extension of the family government already in place. Civil government has one primary function: emergency response. Where there is no emergency, such government simply stays out of the way and practices for proficiency. But it also stockpiles materiel related to the task. To give the warlord and his growing staff time for all this, he can't be bothered with growing his own food and so forth. ANE feudalism wasn't about land ownership, but land occupation. People were his greatest possession. If land could be peacefully shared, then ranging about in the presence of other tribal groups was not an issue. This year we get the valley; next year we use the hills. Howdy, allies! Would you mind if we cut some of these trees? Part of what gives one tribal warlord credibility against the others is the appearance of being well-fed and prosperous. The tribe would willingly keep him looking that way. It's all still family, even if distant kin.
Notice the tax rate would have to be low, almost entirely voluntary, and very purposeful. Nothing hidden because the whole tribe has too many people with their nose in too many other people's business. So it should be, under the assumption they love you and want what's best. No one argues much about what that best interest amounts to, because it's pretty obvious. At some point in the development of such societies, this stuff comes apart. Nobody complains as long as things are reasonably prosperous, no natural disasters strike, no serious diseases, and no other threats too hard to handle. The first time serious trouble comes and takes awhile to resolve, that's the first test of government morality. If the king suffers along with the people, he's a shepherd, a good king. If he tries to minimize his personal losses at the expense of the people, he's a predator, a bad king. (In ANE lore a great hunter is a predator.)
The whole difference is whether the king is willing to sacrifice when it's time to sacrifice. That's part of the role, and that's God's justice. That's trusting God to back up His Laws and carry them through the tough times only He can control. Usurpation of God is another flaw, of course, particularly if the king wants to keep folks stirred up and feeling threatened when there's no threat. The only motive possible would be keeping emergency powers of command and taxation when not justified by circumstances. Such a king is still a predator, and unjust because he won't let God decide the tribe's fortunes. If you can't trust God to back His promises, with a little slop for reasons beyond human ken, you can't do justice.
Civil government should stay out of the way until needed. Otherwise it is evil.
The justice of God does not fail regardless of the state of things.
We are so far away from the ideal, it's almost painful to consider. Again, any increment in the right direction is a blessing. Just because the job is massively huge is no reason to pack up and hide in the wilderness. The more unjust our government and society, more and harder is the work in front of us. We need to get after it.
Most modern Western governments are ostensibly democratic. In reality, it means the level of deception and manipulation are incomprehensible. On top of this, we aren't dealing with garden variety corruption, but corruption which arises from a very real hidden governing power stretching across many nations. When tyranny and corruption are restricted to the local village, it minimizes the general national injustice. When it's many villages corrupt, or even every individual village, it's different kinds of sin and different kinds of injustice. People can still pray for redress and eventually the cycle of things will return to some modicum of justice. When the people turn evil, there's simply no hope. When the people are gullible, it allows the various individual leaders to collude in oppression. The whole issue here is consolidation of corruption, and concentration of power and wealth in fewer hands. The very definition of evil is centralized government over too large of a scale. A good elder can safely rule about 50, and there can be coordinating elders at higher levels.
It won't matter why people allow or promote centralized government. Nothing can justify spitting on God's Laws. Simple greed is one thing, but offering up tempting targets for the predators is risky business. When there is something to gain, you'll have psychopaths taking these highest positions of centralized power and control. That's equivalent to Satan as ruler. ANE emperors knew better. All they really wanted was large armies and more tribute. They avoided setting much legal policy because the client kings and chiefs were presumed competent to handle lesser matters. He was too important to worry about anything which didn't reflect the most basic legal policy consistent with established practice. The only thing in the Ten Commandments which would have been considered revolutionary was the theological statement there was only one God, and even that could be read as saying there is only one national God. No central imperial throne would dirty their hands with dictating finite details for human behavior. True nobility is attending only to the business of your role.
The pretense of democracy is the theft of accountability. If having the people vote is all about making government accountable to voters, then that is at best a very tenuous tie, and guaranteed short lived. Seize control of the electoral process and the game is over. Some of the awfullest evil psychopaths have been elected because the only people allowed to run were psychopaths. Indeed, about the only people who would seek nomination and election would have to be pretty immoral.
Calling attention to this is part of what we do. Even though we know this won't change until God's wrath falls and forces rebuilding from scratch, we would naturally feel this hoax called democratic government as a burning injustice. People are fallen. Give them the vote and they eventually vote themselves into Hell. We are in the latter stages of a system's life. A primary motivation in prophecy, according to God Himself, is so those dropping into the roasting pit would know beyond all doubt there was a God whose justice they could have had.
So we become aware of the following major headaches which won't ever be changed, things we need to denounce on a regular basis when appropriate:
Make your own list; denounce them often and in every way possible by connecting them to more concrete injustices. Here are some issues which are none of the government's business:
Again, make your own lists by extrapolating from what you read in the Bible. Nothing replaces a direct study of the Laws from the official record of the Court of Heaven. Then you'll be in a better position to recognize concrete examples of issues you can denounce with all confidence you are citing God's justice.
This will be short but deserves its own consideration. There is the serious issues of tort and ownership. We already know the Law of Moses requires a Jubilee every fifty years to ensure debt is removed in the same way as old leaven. Periodically starting fresh with some things is God's way of keeping the system in balance. That same Jubilee affects traditional ownership of real estate, too.
There was a reason for ensuring no tribe through misfortune and miscalculation lost all their allotment from God. Mercy is a feature of God's considerations among men. Along with this is realizing there has to be balance between granting parents some authority to choose for their children while granting the children some relief from really bad parental decisions. The notions of land ownership in God's Laws is quite different than they are from Western conceptions.
All land is held in grant from God. He is the real owner, and outlives every tenant. Social stability outweighs property rights in His Laws. This is not communism against capitalism, but feudalism against all foolishness. It's wrong to become overly attached to material goods in the first place, but to the degree we need to certain things to survive on the earth, dependence on God is a virtue. As ultimate owner, He makes the Laws and we are not in a position to argue.
The emphasis on social stability means you should learn to calculate the value of things in terms of how much good it does to people at large. It's fine if you profit from your activities, but you should be wary of letting that become your deity. Grabbing up vast tracts of land simply because you happen to have money and power is outright evil, and there is no mitigation. Motives matter. The same act in the hands of good moral people is buying the rights to control the land for a while as the means to offering relief to someone who has land by no food. If your first instinct is not keeping your community alive, then it won't matter what you do; it will always be wrong. Even charity can have the false motive of creating a false dependency. If you don't love your neighbors, you can't obey God's Laws.
People matter most on this earth in God's eyes. One of the greatest abominations in modern property laws is the corporation. Reducing liability by creating a non-human "person before the law" is just a hideous excuse for taking stuff while avoiding the blame. In every assignment of legal ownership, there must be an individual who accepts the liability personally for everything. It should be obvious this prevents concentrating power and wealth in too few hands, because then a corporation is simply pooling the personal wealth of a great many to overcome some other entity. It's aggression, a destablizing force which can only increase human misery, and offers no advantage to any but the few who are on the board of the corporation.
There simply is no excuse for property ownership by non-human entities.
Jesus summarized the Law of Moses, in essence summarizing all God's Law Covenants, with two basic legal policy statements. First, you owe your allegiance to God. He framed it in the ANE sense of that Eastern Potentate, someone who knows you and seeks to place you within His domain. That He is also Creator should indicate there is no limit to His knowledge of you and His right to decide. Second, your fellow humans are never less important than you are in any and every context. All Laws about human interaction presume you recognize the importance God attaches to humanity as a whole. You may never understand the limits of His concern, but you surely can get your limits correct.
When dealing with other humans, the Hebrew definition of love is not some overwhelming passion of devotion. That's simply an emotion, a cathexis. Love is defined as willfully exerting yourself in the interests of another person. Never mind how you feel at the moment, behave yourself and do the right thing. Never attempt to raise your importance in any context. Distinguish between person and role. Meet your duties to the role, but your fundamental concern is the person. While you surely put your relatives first, they benefit when society as a whole is blessed by justice.
The interaction between role and person is quite dynamic at times. This is why current Western civil and criminal justice is an abomination. Justice must be fluid, and being a righteous judge is not a mere matter of education and intelligence. Our categories and punishments are entirely too rigid, and should not be subject to legislation by popular representatives. The will of the people is a pernicious and capricious danger, always reflecting the fears of the herd. Turning complex issues into a simple routine as an excuse to control all the factors in your environment is one of the worst oppressions known to mankind. We can't be lazy with something so critical in God's eyes. Justice for the most part belongs in the hands of the family, and justice between families and clans is a matter for wise negotiation. They are not permitted to contract out the sacred duty of taking human life seriously.
Some human errors do require a civil authority outside the families. Either by appeal from family to a higher court, or because the very nature of the thing is a substantial threat to the wider society, there is a place for civil justice, however limited. Only when justice by those closest to you has been exhausted do we seek distance and a greater measure of objectivity from parties whose interest is remote. Keeping the initial burden closer means whatever justice is meted is better acquainted with real human needs. This is the fundamental meaning of Jesus' statement about the Laws. People take priority over any other consideration; this is absolute. Not simply the individual, but the individual as member of their society. The larger the threat, the higher the authority which gains jurisdiction.
Peeling back the heavy layers of perversion in our Western national legal and justice systems would destroy the whole thing, and rightly so. Justice means each individual person in each individual context which comes before the court must be handled individually, not according to some cookie-cutter outline of set penalties. It has to remain a matter of people as human beings. Judges cannot pretend to be wholly objective, and prophets are critical to the process of pointing out judicial failure, but somebody has to have the final veto. That's why there is an executive, a king who can overrule everyone but God, the highest human authority in his jurisdiction. Slapping down litigious fools is a critical part of his duties, striking them with the penalties they unjustly sought for others. But at all times the penalties should fit the nature of the human flaw from which it arose, not simply the nature of the crime. Yes, it's always subject to guesswork in the end, but it has to be done and done by real people, and it cannot be cheaply rushed through.
It's not the final result which matters, but the desire, taking it all seriously. Justice itself is powerful enough to keep things in a reasonable balance. Has justice not been done? God notes and decides what action He'll take. We prophets are the primary tool for this. Calling the people to armed revolt is unlikely, but not impossible, in the sense we can declare a ruling regime worthy of God's wrath. The burden upon us is exceedingly heavy for this reason. If we are wrong, injustice grows exponentially from some of the smallest errors. So we observe, accept a certain amount of imprecision as part of the Fall, and pray to God when we see something not just. Then we wait on Him to send us or not.
We are not the truth police, and our personal viewpoint is not law, and certainly not God's Laws. In the broad stretch of human variation between the margins of justice and injustice, people must be allowed a certain amount of failure -- all people, all roles. Justice is primarily instruction along with compensation for loss. Lex Talionis is a very primitive and brutish path, but reflects the lowest level of human justice. Good people will seek to make up any loss they cause another, never mind what prompted them to take such action which caused the loss. They want to make things right. Bad people want unjustified privilege over others. A fundamental element in the Fall was trying to get something God says we cannot and should not have, or getting it by a means He forbade. No one is exempt from the Fall, so no one is exempt from the Laws. Special exemptions for certain roles must always reflect the wider interest of the people as a whole, not the one vested with that role. We as prophets can expect to never really know for sure where to draw the line, but we are expected to love justice because we love people, because that love is justice.
A significant motive for the prophet is holding up the interest of all people, particularly the nation to which we belong.
What happens if a nation honestly strives to obey God's Laws? The Bible reports an incident when the people of Israel humbled themselves before the Law while facing three armies, each equal to their own. They put the Temple Choir out in front of the advancing forces and sang hymns to God. As they topped the first crest above the enemy encampment, they saw more dead bodies than they could count. God had set the three armies against each other because Israel obeyed.
When a nation begins to care about God's Laws, the whole world cannot defeat them in battle. When a nation rejects any thought of God's Laws, a scrawny kid with a slingshot can defeat them. That's just a sample. The blessings and promises attached to the Laws of God are not limited to the precise lists of things noted in Scripture, but in the wider realization of Creation itself working to favor the just nation, and eventually destroying the unjust.
You are supposed to understand there are no absolutes. A great deal of life as individuals and as nations will include patient endurance of unpleasant events which are simply part of the Fall. The reasons for them vary widely, and may include several things at once. Drought and famine is cyclical; prepare for it by saving a little when you have a bumper crop. Other natural disasters are cyclical, too, and the best scientific analysis will never quite pin it down. Some things should be obvious: You don't build in a flood plain simply because it's dry this year, and you don't build in a quake zone simply because the fault line is stable for now. Other things are simply the losses no human can predict, and God owes you no explanations.
The point is embracing His justice makes things as good as they are going to be. While national injustice may take a while to catch up, the consequences are certain. Don't sell future generations short for your comfort today. Not caring about your descendants is simply evil, but so is letting them rule before their time. It's not about performance which humans can measure with their intellect, but desire. A sincere desire to be just guarantees you and your tribe will do well.
Prophets usually don't take sides in human disputes. Most of the time they are both wrong. We aren't supporting anything which doesn't reflect God's justice. At some point rather early in our calling, we become so identified with justice we simply don't care about much else. There are plenty of things which aren't a matter of justice, but we often don't have time for them.
As we grow accustomed to think of all things in terms of divine justice, we become increasingly impatient with frivolous religious expressions. We are even somewhat annoyed by most popular religious experience, including a lot of sermons and almost all Bible teaching we are likely to encounter these days. It all seems a waste of time. Meanwhile, we have available to us a vast store of patience for a lot of things we simply can't control. We come early to the realization there is much we can't and don't want to fix. Thus, we learn to pass the time with prayer and reflection. A critical asset to the prophet is contemplation, because the brain is simply too slow on the uptake of justice.
While we eagerly hope for God's justice to rain down, whether in wrath or in blessing, we are utterly certain God is in control. We are equally certain we don't always get to see that control. Still, we are more certain of His power to back His Laws than we are of our own names. We don't use human means to advance justice. This is why we are reluctant to take up arms, or engage in anything resembling activism. We rely entirely on divine power working through whatever means of communication we have.
We believe in miracles. Far and away, the vast majority of miracles performed by Jesus were a matter of correcting an injustice. They were miracles under the Law, restoring justice by means of making things as they should have been. Even His eviction of demonic powers was a matter of justice, because demons on this human plane are also subject to the Laws of this plane. It's not religion; it's just the way the universe operates if we'll give it a chance. Indeed, part of the prophet's mission is praying for miracles for others, and seeing them happen. Sometimes it seems frivolous from the human viewpoint, but justice speaks like thunder in our souls to point out what matters to God's justice. At other times we'll walk away weeping because we know God says He won't fix something so tragic. It's never really based on human need, and certainly not according to any human logic, but on justice and the needs of mission.
This, too, teaches us justice. It applies to our personal lives. If we walk in justice, we can pray for things the Laws promise when others near us have no hope. Sometimes, in order to fulfill justice for us, He'll pour His mercy on the entire area where we reside. Storms drop rain, but destruction seems to pass us by -- or fire, or theft, or other forms of plague. There will always be variations which don't quite make sense to us. Not everything goes just right, but those things which serve to demonstrate justice. We need to live and learn it, and merge into our very being.
When people come to us as prophets with a prayer request, we immediately seek to assess things based on our sense of justice. We seek to discern between what is simply the basic ration of human suffering, or what arises from injustice, and what demands first restoring justice. It's not about judging anyone; it's about our only mission in this life. Sometimes it requires a good bit of prayer and waiting before something is stirred, and we have peace about the answer. We pray first for God's justice, then for discernment and wise understanding about justice in this case. This is a major element in what we as prophets do, handling prayer requests. Anyone can do it, for its a heavenly mandate; we must do it.
Nobody can explain for you how God answers. That non-conscious part of you feeds back into your will, and somehow you just know what is required of you. It will take some practice filtering out false impressions from other sources inside us. At some point, you begin finding your sense of peace about things. Your first biggest test will be learning to trust those non-conscious sources. It will also be your first prophetic miracle when that sense of knowing begins to manifest. It's not magic, it's not all spiritual and religious; it's justice. It's the Laws of God at work according to His revealed promises. This is the reality of how Creation works, down here on the human level.
Once you become accustomed to the presence of a powerful moral force woven into the very fabric of reality, everything changes.
Nobody can package it all neatly for you. That's the very nature of how we approach justice. All I've done here is summarize my own experience with justice and prophesy. I'm just getting started good myself, so I would no doubt write a different book if you ask me some years from now.
However, it is a prophetic burden itself which compels this writing. The need of this world is so very desperate. Without prophets to begin the work of restoring justice, vast stretches of humanity will suffer and die unnecessarily. Let's do what we can to stop the madness.
PUBLIC DOMAIN: Copyright declined by author at publication.
First edition July 2011