SIN > Unmasked: Failing to ‘do what you know’

Disobedience – but not as you know it.

Anybody who has followed my blogs will get that I see that there exists a type of knowledge and knowing that the world calls ‘esoteric’. [ http://godwithoutchurch.blogspot.com/ ] This shouldn’t trouble any keen disciple of Jesus, since he made it quite plain (e.g. as we have seen in Matthew 13) that it is a normal part of the kingdom of God and His ekklesia that knowledge is not entirely up to us and our will and power to know.  God searches motives and knows us all according to our motivations and intent regarding knowledge.  We can be ‘blocked’ from knowing things.

By nature, we humans crave power; that’s why we happily pursue the idea that “knowledge is power” even when it might be destructive or negative power over against power than adds, constructs and instructs.  God has known that all along; that’s why He reserves the right to administer knowledge and knowing 'according to His will' among us “mere mortals”.

In the New Testament, there are three different Greek words translated into English as some kind or type of (or means to) knowledge; and one of those is eidw which reasonably translates into English as intuition and discernment.  In my frame of reference, humans are comprised of body, soul and spirit; and knowledge – or at least the process of knowing something – can be initiated in all of those locales.  Intuition/discernment tends to have its ignition in the spirit – and, as Paul teaches us, it is in (with, by) the spirit that we truly know another person.  Disciples of Jesus are encouraged to get to know each other this way: see his second letter to the Corinthians 5:16.

Man’s ways may tell us we’re out of our mind; but Paul wisely notes: “If we are out of our mind, it is for God; if we are of sound mind, it is for you.” (2 Corinthians 5:13).

“Hence”, he says, “from now on we regard no one according to the flesh [alone].  Although we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.  Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold the new has come!”  And “All this is from God...” he says.  The ‘new’ embraces intuition and discernment and their pivotal role.

And let me point out too that the New Testament contains plenty of references to the skill of discernment, its critical importance to disciples of Jesus, and its position as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit given by the grace of God to some believers for the benefit of His ekklesia. Some theologians refer to it as ‘moral perception’, insight, and the practical application of the thing ‘known’.

If we allow this concept, the concept of intuition, and the understandings coming to us from Jesus’ words about God’s reading our motivations and intentions before allowing us to ‘hear’ correctly, we can make a whole lot better sense of the passage I’m referring to here: Hebrews chapter 2.

We must pay closer attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.  For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every transgression and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?

A motto I have found helpful and valuable in my journey with God is: ‘When you see a ‘therefore’, look to see what it’s there for.”  These first words of Hebrews 2 have a ‘therefore’; what is it there for?  Perhaps it’s there to encourage us to re-read the letter without the human-imposed chapter and verse numbers to get the writer’s message in context.

We need to pay proper attention to what we have heard – a binding ‘message spoken by angels’ – lest we drift away from it.  And ‘drifting away’ embraces two of the concepts we talked about earlier in our definition of sin: falling short and veering across a demarcation line.

The writer of this letter is telling the Hebrew believers that this message is binding precisely because it was mediated to us by angels, not by humans.  What is the message?  In the immediate, the message is Hebrews chapter 1 – the paragraphs from the beginning of the letter up to the text that says ‘therefore’.  Beyond that, it is the story of Jesus they have all just lived through, from His pre-birth announcement to his ascension into glory.  And it was ‘spoken’ “On many past occasions and in many different ways ... to our fathers [ancestors] through the prophets.”

The point the writer is making throughout the first part of his letter is – as I have referenced elsewhere – the clear and marked superiority of the new covenant in Jesus Christ over the old covenant of Abraham, Moses and even David.  The new covenant is a covenant brokered by angels, not humans; and its essential nature is a far superior message about a far superior priesthood and sacrifice, announced and mediated by angels, not by humans and so on.

My 50+ years of experience as a follower of Jesus tells me that huge tracts of humanity have done precisely what the writer to the Hebrews was warning against: missing the point!  We are not supposed to blend the old covenant with the new as if the new simply extends or augments the old; we are supposed to get the message that the new covenant supplants, usurps and replaces the old – there can be no blending and co-habitation.

And to make his point with utter profundity, he announces that even Abraham, Moses and David themselves understood this.

One of my favourite authors is Brian McLaren.  Along with famed fellow-author Tony Campolo, they wrote Adventures in Missing the Point, (Zondervan 2006).  In my view, church history from the death of the first apostles til now is close to 2,000 years of adventures in missing the point – with all-too-few rare exceptions.  The history of divisions, schisms, denominations, murders (sanitised into ‘martyrdoms’) and political justifications indicate to me that we act as if Hebrews was not penned by an apostle of Jesus or that it only applies if we think it applies and how we think it applies – usually presenting us in favourable light without question.

Now – what’s this got to do with disobedience?  If you haven’t already worked it out, let me explain.

The popular (and might I stress predominantly Western European) notion of obedience and disobedience is that it’s about carrying out (or not) a command, an order, an instruction, a law, a rule, a regulation, a decree, a precept, an ultimatum.  Most people I speak to imagine that obeying or disobeying God is about identifying a command, law or instruction God has previously given and we have written down somewhere.  Most notable is, of course, the ten commandments.

But is that what Jesus said?  On the one hand, he said that, if you choose to be a legalist, if you break one of the laws, you are guilty of breaking them all – a rather difficult standard for sure.  On the other hand, he said that there really is only one law – or perhaps two (if you want to put a full stop mid sentence).  Both Jesus and Paul concur: Matthew 22 and Galatians 5 tell us that the whole law is fulfilled in a single decree – to love as you have been loved by God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Suddenly ‘law’ is a meaningless concept when it comes to obedience and disobedience if by ‘law’ we mean any of the things in the paragraph above.  And that’s what Paul iterates over and over again.  Law is nothing more nor less than a kind of ‘school-master’ or mentor, guru, guide or signpost to draw us towards our proper destination: Christ.

One thing I’ve learned from Australian aboriginal disciples of Jesus is that aboriginal culture knows both law and lore; and that’s not uncommon in cultures around the world.  However, the polity of most Western European countries is based on law: “law and order” and “rule of law” – with little or no attention to “lore”.  But it is this concept of lore that disciples of Jesus need to catch up with.  This is what etymonline.com says about lore:

Lore is almost always an oral tradition passed down through the generations; and it is also almost always a form of esoteric knowledge.  So, what if the “new things” in Christ include a move by God to make His ways and His wishes known to His children via the spirit rather than by the mind and the body?  What if the message of the Old Testament book Song of Solomon is there precisely to unveil this part of God for us?  What if Paul’s concepts of knowing people (including Jesus) according to (by) the spirit and ‘living according to the Spirit’ are “how it’s done” in the new covenant?  What if we are meant to get our knowledge and learning from the Holy Spirit via our spirit rather than by rote learning, catechism, formal education or repetition of laws?

I wonder sometimes if Paul’s concept of “the law of the Spirit” might better be rendered “the lore of the Spirit”, since it is not at all a law code or any kind of set of instructions, but an unwritten ‘code of conduct’ transmitted spiritually down the generations.

What if God, seeking us out for intimacy and union as a good father does both his natural and his adopted children, encrypts his message for us, but first plants within us the encryption tool to both send and receive his message (the granting of the Holy Spirit)?

My actual experience with this dates back to 1983, while I was (albeit briefly) fulfilling a role as a ‘pastor’ in a rural parish in Australia.  God had his version of WhatsApp even before digital technology and computers were common.  We messaged each other back and forth for years; but it began when God got my number and messaged me: I want you to do what you know.  I didn’t have to think at all about what he meant: my intuition, insight, perception was decoded from eternity-speak into my spirit.  And from that day, that’s the path my life took: discerning the Spirit and ‘obeying’.  And that is precisely what this passage in Hebrews is talking about.

God has a version of WhatsApp or Signal that neither government nor police; neither Zuckerberg, Gates nor Cook; neither black-hat nor white-hat hackers can breach.  It transmits the “lore” of eternity – the zone of God’s abode; and it is both infinitely and organically variable for each of God’s hand-crafted individuals as well as for the channel we know of as ekklesia in all its forms: micro, mezzo and macro via the spiritual gifts God has granted her.

Furthermore, it is mediated by angels, not by humans; and is not subject to outages, power failures or data corruption or theft.  However, we might “fall asleep at the wheel” as we say.

We have two big problems:

One, we don’t trust it; we constantly seek verification from vastly inferior sources, questioning not just the message but the messenger, and God Himself.

Two (in part because we don’t trust it), we don’t “obey” it – and that, in my view, is precisely what the writer of the letter to the Hebrews was getting at in chapter 2.

The old hymn says: Trust and obey | for there’s no other way | to be happy in Jesus...

“Without faith, it is impossible to please God.”  Even if, at the end of time, we all come to faith in God (because that was God’s intention all along), might not we, our relationships with people and the planet, and our administration and politics on planet earth be transformed by ensuring we have the app; that we participate; and that we regularly remind ourselves and each other to “pay closer attention ... so that we don’t drift away [i.e. sin]”; and in so doing, find ourselves in all kinds of shit because we opt to neglect God’s lore – so readily available?

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the ekklesias.”

Hebrews was written to Jews.  On an occasion in Jesus’ ministry (see John 10), he was talking to some Jews as he strode around the temple courts in Solomon’s Colonade.  [It is possible some of these Jews were later the addressees of the letter.]  They stopped him and demanded: “How long will you keep us in suspense?  If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”  To which Jesus replied:

“I already told you, but you did not believe.  The works I do in my Father’s name testify on my behalf.  But because you are not my sheep, you refuse to believe.  My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.  No one can snatch them out of my hand.  My Father who has given them to me is greater than all.  No one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.  I and the Father are one.”

“At this, the Jews again picked up stones to stone him...”

There’s an app for that!  But it won’t work on a “smart” phone.

Next: “It’s only wrong if you get caught.”