Just Passing Through

First, let's make it clear the term "patriotism" means love of country, not necessarily love of the government which rules that country. Genuine patriotism may well be the very best reason to oppose any particular government policy.

For many years, I have been studying the patriots who tend to take issue with government policies here in the US. While I do understand the logic of their arguments, and offer some highly qualified support for their resistance to government evil, I'm not really a part of that movement. It's not because I don't support the call for liberty, but primarily because I do. What sets me apart from them is a very substantial difference in assumptions.

My model is Jesus Christ. Not some highly Westernized, rationalist twisted cultural Jesus of the Western middle class, but the Jesus of the Ancient Near Eastern Hebrew culture. By modern academic definitions, Jesus was a mystic, because He talked about knowing God personally, denied any part of it could be told in literal terms, and fought hard to make people understand human intellect was not going to get you there. He told people they had to die on a cross to meet God personally, but clearly indicated He didn't meant it literally for His followers, only Himself. But He warned it could be literal, but it didn't really matter. Then His closest followers told us we had to experience that death in some mystical fashion, dying so we could live. That Jesus.

According to that style of understanding, the Bible declares a very distinct standard for human governments. You can call it what you like, but in the Bible it talks about a covenant God made with the human race after the Flood. I refer to that as the Covenant of Noah. Typical of Ancient Hebrew culture, many of the provisions aren't stated clearly, but it's assumed you already knew something about them. So the burden is upon us to go back and try to reconstruct the background, the common knowledge of folks among the original audience of the text of Scripture. It's not easy, but we have a pretty good picture of it, simply because the Bible itself tends to fill in the blanks. All it requires is setting aside modern Western rationalism to see it.

Any way, the point here is, that standard assumes certain unstated requirements to go along with this Covenant of Noah. One of them is a prescription for human governments, as to what they must accomplish. When you read between the lines, with a healthy dose of Hebrew understanding, you realize there is only one way to fulfill the provisions: You have to live under a tribal social structure, and your government absolutely must be family. No one can tell you what to do who isn't related by blood or marriage. Of course, the Bible allows for covenants to replicate the family kinship, but only if the structure remains tribal. It's not about DNA so much as bonding.

Obviously, not a single Western government in existence today meets this standard. Just as obviously, not a single human government in the West is okay with God. We Americans like to imagine our structure is somehow close to God's intent, but that's because we ignore that thousands of years of human history before Christ. Instead, we have this silly notion, without even thinking about it, the Enlightenment Period was when God finally clarified what He meant. Or at least, we act that way, even though the intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment rejected God. How strange we should imagine God blesses our US Constitution when it's based on the assumption He isn't there, or at least has no real interest. So while many of our Founding Fathers claimed to apply the Bible to our organic forming document, they read that Bible through Enlightenment eyes.

So the US Constitution itself, never mind modern departures, is not what God had in mind. In fact, the entire social structure of this nation is contrary to God's command. It's not worth saving. My government, at it's very core, shakes its fist in the face of my God, as does the nation itself. Ignorance of this basic requirement is not an excuse, since it's all there in the Bible. I love people because I love my God, who sent His Son to die for them. But it is this very love for them which requires I not support the current system, neither society nor government. It leads only to death.

Now, this nation is dying, and justly so. Meanwhile, some folks in the government make it worse by the hardness of their hearts. Any attempt at correcting abuses reaps more abuse. Protests are utterly futile, though it may not be obvious. Should the entire population rise up to march on Washington DC right now, all it would accomplish is changing how they screw us, not whether they do. The only way to stop it, really, is kill most of those in government right now. Some of the patriots I study are calling for that. But what they refuse to recognize is we lack the fundamental social and philosophical structure for replacing it with something better. Starting all over again from scratch will not make it better, because it will still lead to the same tyrannies under which we suffer now, but we'll get there much quicker than last time.

Jesus fought His government on the same terms. He proposed a shift of concern back to the mystical, because what's going on here is just human sin. Rebuild the Davidic Kingdom of Israel? Why? Israel would still reject God's intent, and repeat all the old sins which got Israel in trouble in the first place. No, it's best to clarify the situation by pointing out no human government would ever do what God really demands, not since humanity drifted so very far away from God's Laws (which began with Noah). The followers of Jesus will naturally face their government the same way, with utter cynicism about what politics can accomplish. It's entertaining, but don't expect any good to come of it. Meanwhile, we have a mission to steer people away from the concerns of this hopeless world, to focus on the Higher Realm.

Part of my calling from God includes studying the patriot types. I once thought they knew where they were going. They don't. He will use some of them the way He uses all mankind, under His sovereign will for the broader story of Creation. Things will get steadily worse, often in cycles, but it always goes back to the same kinds of evil: oppression, greed, arrogance, etc. The current system will come apart completely. While some vestiges of it will come around again, it won't be the same thing. What comes next is surely going to be worse in the long run. Whether it comes at the hands of the patriot militias, the ravages of a broader popular uprising, a complete dissolution of the empire, or whatever, it won't matter. God has already warned how it will go in broad general terms.

So resist the imperial government as you wish, but it will cost you. Don't be surprised when it fails to fix anything. I'll be watching with part of my attention, because that's what God called me to do. Meanwhile, I'm doing my best to declare His Word, and to call folks to a much higher purpose, much higher concerns than mere human politics.

Today is the US holiday Thanksgiving. Before this day even comes, we all have Christmas on our minds.

Despite the term "Christmas" being an abbreviation for "Christ's Mass," we can easily prove Jesus was not born in the winter. As to why it now appears on December 25 depends on your level of cynicism. The popular story is the church decided to move the celebration to that date in order to knock off a very debauched pagan celebration rooted in very ancient times and solar worship. Or maybe it was just a very strong rival religion like Mithraism. Frankly, I find it more likely a certain emperor did this as part of a subtle campaign to paganize Christianity so he didn't have to make any inconvenient changes in his pagan habits.

Besides that, the ancient Hebrews apparently put no stock in birthdays. There is very little mention of it in the Old Testament, primarily to note it was a big deal with the Pharaoh of Egypt. We find in ancient literature of the world birthdays were a major element in worship of pagan deities. The Hebrews were distinctly casual about such things where it touches mere humans. Most feasts were movable, based on the Hebrew calendar, which was neither solar nor precisely lunar. Precision is decidedly a minor issue in Hebrew thinking. It only mattered on those few occasions when God said it did. Lest we forget, God did not simply choose the Hebrew nation as the best place to reveal Himself, but shaped that culture Himself with constant interventions, as part of His ultimate plan for revealing Himself to the world. To truly understand God, you absolutely must understand His native cultural matrix. So much was this an issue we can see Jesus constantly criticized the leaders and culture of His day for being too Hellenized and not nearly Hebraic enough.

The biblical view of Christmas is to treat it as a pagan celebration with Bible verses plastered over the outside.

But as with all culturally based holidays, most of which have pagan roots, we have come so very far away from those times. Even the Canaanite ritual of tree decoration is now essentially harmless in religious terms. You can celebrate the cultural rituals of Christmas because most people have no real interest in the facts, nor the truth which is deeper than the facts. Just keep in your mind, it was never really about Christ.

Apparently my hardware is just a little too new for Ubuntu and friends. I never could get it talk to my DVD-R. Since burning CDs and DVDs are critical to my volunteer work, that means I had to find something else. SUSE had released the full version of 11.2, so I gave it a try.

So far, it's working quite nicely. I'll let you know if anything bothers me too much.

Update: I won't go into gory details, but I had to fix a few things.

• sound -- I had to tell ALSA the hardware (Intel HDA) was configured by Dell using the Realtek ALC888 codec so it could operate the various sound ports properly.
  
• aisleriot -- GNOME project folks decided to drop the older card faces and forced everyone to accept this ugly, unreadable "cool" looking design. I hunted down the graphical source file (bonded.svg) for the original card set and fixed that.
  
• screensaver -- The GNOME screensaver has been broken for a long time, and it seems the same on every Linux distro. It tries to put desktop machines into suspend mode, and most will not recover without rebooting. I cut it off and changed the controls to run the original Xscreensaver, since it works better and has better options.
  

I see the reflection in my spirit. The reflection is not pretty. A soul, a badly bent and broken soul, with too many wounds, battered into silence before the world. When the Enemy condemns the evil world, I can't claim to be separate from it.

Billions of electrons locked into my words, but words mean nothing if there is no manifestation to match them.

Looking back, I see all the times when some golden moment passed me by -- I didn't know what gold was. A blessed gift from the Father, a chance to stand in for Him in the life of some other. But I stood dumb, frozen by the misery of my own heart. The pain of others was drowned out by my own pain, thinking of myself and my own needs.

I call to the Father, begging Him to let me die. Let that painful knot of sorrow be lost on the Cross. Take away my sense of self; let me be lost in Your own Presence. Take me away, and fill the husk with yourself. When I look into the mirror, let me see the Crown of Thorns.

To provide a proper context for understanding evangelism, we should summarize our understanding of Biblical revelation regarding human nature. From the beginning, we were beings with flesh, soul and spirit. In the Garden, we chose sin, and our spirits died. All human flesh is now born with dead spirits. To recover that spiritual life requires a miracle from God. Further, it is entirely at the initiative, the whim, of God alone. The Fall destroyed even our ability to desire peace with God, as Paul so bluntly states in Romans. Nothing any human can do will change this, so evangelism is not about changing the spiritual status of anyone. Teaching otherwise is blasphemy, for it assumes a human ability for something God says is His alone.

We are aware there is some overlap between good religion or righteous living on the one hand, and spiritual birth on the other hand. Since things spiritual cannot be verbalized nor understood fully by the human mind, we can't pretend to understand how they relate, except to know we cannot assume observed righteousness and spiritual life are the same thing. To teach they are the same is heresy. We cannot know what God knows about a person, we can only know what God requires of us in relation to that person. He tells us in the Bible some of the earmarks of righteousness, and shows how they can help us grasp the spiritual reality, but nowhere does He say human behavior actually proves anything either way.

What we want to see in the world is a functional loyalty to Our Lord of Heaven. We are granted enough understanding to help people struggle with this loyalty in their souls, but only if they feel burdened to struggle. The true grasp of this requires the Spirit of God working through our living spirits to bring the mind into compliance with something the mind cannot handle unaided. Even the very act of obedience requires a miracle. Nothing we can do, even with the mastery of our spirits over our minds, will change the reality for someone else.

What we hope to see is rightly nothing more than a psychological conversion. Even here, we cannot really make anything happen. For centuries, we have been taught to use the methods of the sales pitch. We take advantage of the listener's social conditioning and run them into a logical corner. It's a very shallow technique which typically yields shallow and short-term results. This is not the work of God, and if anyone does actually convert, it's only because God had already been working with them. In other words, any happy results come in spite of the technique. A genuine conversion of loyalty requires divine intervention just as much as spiritual birth -- both are gifts from God.

Yet, here again, this is not the proper motive for evangelism. While it is our hope, it is not our job. The job is going and sharing. We share the gospel because Christ commanded it, not because we should expect anyone to repent. Since not all of us are commanded individually to preach, it puts the focus on the totality of how we live. We have been granted no power or leverage over God or other people, only over ourselves. If God does not empower the change first, nothing we say or do will bring it about. If we live according to His Word, He has promised to use that to move others to seek Him. Our mission in evangelism is being there to guide them as they seek Him.

None of this requires learning a special vocabulary, and certainly not as a tool to bludgeon others logically. Aristotelian (i.e., Western) notions of how people come to know things, how people discern something is true or not true ("epistemology") guarantees you will not understand the Bible itself, much less the call to live Christ. You cannot possibly walk in the Spirit if you insist on a Western rational framework, since the entire work of the Spirit takes place above the rational capacity of the human mind. Use human logic to do human things, but at the very point you enter the Spirit Realm, it requires the logic of Heaven, which is utterly different.

Far too many churches have developed a vocabulary which creates a terrifying prospect. When people swallow a canned spiel and mouth the written prayer, they are told they are born again and are assured a place in Heaven. So we have thousands of people who honestly believe they are spiritually alive, that Jesus is in their hearts, when no such thing has happened. Indeed, they haven't even been properly converted psychologically, so they bring their hideous motives into the church ministries, all too sure it's from God Himself. Is it any surprise the churches are drifting so far away from the New Testament?