05-08-2019, 07:04 AM
5. Jesus the Messiah
When Christ began His ministry, a critical element in what He did was to call His people back to the ancient Hebrew understanding of the Covenant. A great deal of what He had to say is hard to grasp unless you understand that. Every debate He had with the Pharisees and scribes was based on this call back to what Moses actually wrote, and the cultural traditions of the ancient Hebrew nation.
If you and I don't take the time to understand this tug of war, particularly what the ancient Hebrew way of thinking was, we cannot understand Jesus the man. What had the Jews forsaken? What were the key differences between the Pharisees and the forefathers?
First and foremost is the Fall. You can call it what you like, but the entire Ancient Near East took for granted that humans were inherently broken, incapable of much good on their own. Without divine intervention, people only rarely aspired to anything of importance. Right next to this was a critically different interpretation of what was important. Conquering and building empires wasn't that important; what really mattered was lasting moral influence.
In their minds, mitigating the rotten human nature was of paramount importance. While all of these civilizations varied in how they sought for answers to this problem, they all shared a perception that the universe around them was a living thing that wasn't fallen, and that it spoke with a thousand voices on how we humans could do better. So the underlying issue was how to hear and translate those voices. There was always some very real life force out there that held the answers.
But they were deeply convinced that our sensory inputs, and our ability to reason, were totally insufficient to access those answers. They relied on some other faculty, something we could use if we chose to activate it. Within the vast range of civilizations in the Ancient Near East, virtually all of them shared this basic orientation, this fundamental assumption about reality. The Hebrew people were no different; it's quite discernible in the way the Bible was written.
So in the Bible we can detect a thread of thinking that the heart was the seat of this higher faculty. Scripture presumes you understand that your heart is a sensory organ of itself, capable of hearing those hidden voices in the universe. The books of the Old Testament counsel us to get our hearts right, to commit to God as our feudal Master and Lord. In Hebrew literature, He is the single Person behind those thousand voices of Creation calling out to us in His name. The trees clap their hands in celebration of His greatness; the mountains and the hills sing deeply His praise; the sun, moon and stars shine His glory. There is a sense in which they meant this quite literally. Your senses and mind can't pick it up, but your heart could if you chose to invest the focus of your conscious awareness there.
This is the very thing destroyed by Hellenism. Alexander's tutor from his youth, Aristotle, flatly rejected this mystical heart-led awareness. He insisted that the human intellect was superior to all other human capabilities. This was the driving force in what we now call Aristotelian logic: To destroy the mystical awareness that had guided humanity from Eden all the way up to the time Alexander's father began building an empire his son would spread across the world.
Why did God not protect His people from this complete shift in orientation? Because they had already left behind the ancient Hebrew ways God Himself had designed for them. If they were determined to leave it, then it would flee from them first. So with the invasion of this Hellenistic approach into the Land of the Bible, the leadership of Judah not long after their return to the land, bought into this massive lie and gave birth to the materialistic legalism of the Pharisees. This is the very shift in orientation that Jesus condemned in His debates with the scribes and Pharisees.
Jesus was determined by His Father's commission to rebuild the nation on those ancient Hebrew traditions. The nation had this one last chance to get it right, and they murdered Him instead. Jesus saw that coming. He warned His disciples repeatedly that this was not going to work, that the business of the Messianic Kingdom was not with the earthly nation of Israel, but would become a kingdom of hearts. He was determined to restore what His Father had given as the rich gift of redemption by a change of heart, by a heart-led commitment to the covenant God of Abraham.
6. The Church Failed
Granted, English translations don't handle this very well. That's because the entire range of Western Civilization, and the Western Church history, quickly went off the rails on this very issue. Shortly after the death of the last Apostle, Jesus' cousin John, the leading scholars of Christian faith drifted back into the Hellenistic approach to understanding, and once again the heart of faith died out.
During three centuries of persecution, the active faith of Christians remained strong. That's how things works; if you put people under pressure, you find out what really matters to them. But all that time, the philosophical foundation of Christian faith was being hollowed out. When Roman Emperor Constantine recognized how powerful Christian faith was, he decided to court the leadership of the churches so he could use their religion to strengthen his reign. It was a death-blow. Taking away persecution and making them comfortable exposed the weakness that had been eating away at the core of their religion. They compromised, not in their cerebral doctrines, but in their commitment to the otherworldly nature of genuine faith.
This world is broken. It cannot be healed. When Christ returns, it will be destroyed. That's the poignant reminder in 1 Corinthians 15:50-58, and 2 Peter 3:10-13. Do not invest too much energy in saving this world. Instead, we are to live by divine justice for as long as the Lord leaves us here, but we should be eager to get out of this world. Yes, the revelation of God can make life worth living in this world, because it is the secret of how Creation works. The Fall took away that understanding; the Fall was the choice to trust our senses and logic over the revelation of God in our hearts. The human intellect will not survive the Second Coming of Christ.
Yet following the church leaders' decision to compromise with political rulers, they began investing their energies in restructuring religion in terms of human reason. Step by step, it was that same series of mistakes Israel made in departing the ancient ways. The failure was not in faith, but in the human organization.
Every time someone stepped up to reform and restore the ancient faith, they kept trying to change the intellectual ideas and the organization, but nobody talked of restoring the heart to its role as God intended. Instead, the terminology of trusting the heart was invested with a different meaning. Such was the cultural mythology of Western Civilization, that the heart is merely a repository of sentiment, the combined influences of our environment and our individual personalities. In the Bible, the heart is the seat of conviction and faith, something that comes down from above.
Stop for a moment and consider what a difference there is between those two.
It's not that we need to mend our churches and our religions. So long as they are founded and built on any part of Western traditions, they cannot accomplish the mission of Christ. He was a heart-led man who promoted the ancient Hebrew ways of His people. He was a man of the Ancient Near East. Christianity is properly an eastern mystical religion because the Bible is an eastern mystical book. You cannot truly serve Christ from a Western orientation.
When Christ began His ministry, a critical element in what He did was to call His people back to the ancient Hebrew understanding of the Covenant. A great deal of what He had to say is hard to grasp unless you understand that. Every debate He had with the Pharisees and scribes was based on this call back to what Moses actually wrote, and the cultural traditions of the ancient Hebrew nation.
If you and I don't take the time to understand this tug of war, particularly what the ancient Hebrew way of thinking was, we cannot understand Jesus the man. What had the Jews forsaken? What were the key differences between the Pharisees and the forefathers?
First and foremost is the Fall. You can call it what you like, but the entire Ancient Near East took for granted that humans were inherently broken, incapable of much good on their own. Without divine intervention, people only rarely aspired to anything of importance. Right next to this was a critically different interpretation of what was important. Conquering and building empires wasn't that important; what really mattered was lasting moral influence.
In their minds, mitigating the rotten human nature was of paramount importance. While all of these civilizations varied in how they sought for answers to this problem, they all shared a perception that the universe around them was a living thing that wasn't fallen, and that it spoke with a thousand voices on how we humans could do better. So the underlying issue was how to hear and translate those voices. There was always some very real life force out there that held the answers.
But they were deeply convinced that our sensory inputs, and our ability to reason, were totally insufficient to access those answers. They relied on some other faculty, something we could use if we chose to activate it. Within the vast range of civilizations in the Ancient Near East, virtually all of them shared this basic orientation, this fundamental assumption about reality. The Hebrew people were no different; it's quite discernible in the way the Bible was written.
So in the Bible we can detect a thread of thinking that the heart was the seat of this higher faculty. Scripture presumes you understand that your heart is a sensory organ of itself, capable of hearing those hidden voices in the universe. The books of the Old Testament counsel us to get our hearts right, to commit to God as our feudal Master and Lord. In Hebrew literature, He is the single Person behind those thousand voices of Creation calling out to us in His name. The trees clap their hands in celebration of His greatness; the mountains and the hills sing deeply His praise; the sun, moon and stars shine His glory. There is a sense in which they meant this quite literally. Your senses and mind can't pick it up, but your heart could if you chose to invest the focus of your conscious awareness there.
This is the very thing destroyed by Hellenism. Alexander's tutor from his youth, Aristotle, flatly rejected this mystical heart-led awareness. He insisted that the human intellect was superior to all other human capabilities. This was the driving force in what we now call Aristotelian logic: To destroy the mystical awareness that had guided humanity from Eden all the way up to the time Alexander's father began building an empire his son would spread across the world.
Why did God not protect His people from this complete shift in orientation? Because they had already left behind the ancient Hebrew ways God Himself had designed for them. If they were determined to leave it, then it would flee from them first. So with the invasion of this Hellenistic approach into the Land of the Bible, the leadership of Judah not long after their return to the land, bought into this massive lie and gave birth to the materialistic legalism of the Pharisees. This is the very shift in orientation that Jesus condemned in His debates with the scribes and Pharisees.
Jesus was determined by His Father's commission to rebuild the nation on those ancient Hebrew traditions. The nation had this one last chance to get it right, and they murdered Him instead. Jesus saw that coming. He warned His disciples repeatedly that this was not going to work, that the business of the Messianic Kingdom was not with the earthly nation of Israel, but would become a kingdom of hearts. He was determined to restore what His Father had given as the rich gift of redemption by a change of heart, by a heart-led commitment to the covenant God of Abraham.
6. The Church Failed
Granted, English translations don't handle this very well. That's because the entire range of Western Civilization, and the Western Church history, quickly went off the rails on this very issue. Shortly after the death of the last Apostle, Jesus' cousin John, the leading scholars of Christian faith drifted back into the Hellenistic approach to understanding, and once again the heart of faith died out.
During three centuries of persecution, the active faith of Christians remained strong. That's how things works; if you put people under pressure, you find out what really matters to them. But all that time, the philosophical foundation of Christian faith was being hollowed out. When Roman Emperor Constantine recognized how powerful Christian faith was, he decided to court the leadership of the churches so he could use their religion to strengthen his reign. It was a death-blow. Taking away persecution and making them comfortable exposed the weakness that had been eating away at the core of their religion. They compromised, not in their cerebral doctrines, but in their commitment to the otherworldly nature of genuine faith.
This world is broken. It cannot be healed. When Christ returns, it will be destroyed. That's the poignant reminder in 1 Corinthians 15:50-58, and 2 Peter 3:10-13. Do not invest too much energy in saving this world. Instead, we are to live by divine justice for as long as the Lord leaves us here, but we should be eager to get out of this world. Yes, the revelation of God can make life worth living in this world, because it is the secret of how Creation works. The Fall took away that understanding; the Fall was the choice to trust our senses and logic over the revelation of God in our hearts. The human intellect will not survive the Second Coming of Christ.
Yet following the church leaders' decision to compromise with political rulers, they began investing their energies in restructuring religion in terms of human reason. Step by step, it was that same series of mistakes Israel made in departing the ancient ways. The failure was not in faith, but in the human organization.
Every time someone stepped up to reform and restore the ancient faith, they kept trying to change the intellectual ideas and the organization, but nobody talked of restoring the heart to its role as God intended. Instead, the terminology of trusting the heart was invested with a different meaning. Such was the cultural mythology of Western Civilization, that the heart is merely a repository of sentiment, the combined influences of our environment and our individual personalities. In the Bible, the heart is the seat of conviction and faith, something that comes down from above.
Stop for a moment and consider what a difference there is between those two.
It's not that we need to mend our churches and our religions. So long as they are founded and built on any part of Western traditions, they cannot accomplish the mission of Christ. He was a heart-led man who promoted the ancient Hebrew ways of His people. He was a man of the Ancient Near East. Christianity is properly an eastern mystical religion because the Bible is an eastern mystical book. You cannot truly serve Christ from a Western orientation.