Have You Seen It?
Western biblical scholars tend to dismiss much of the Old Covenant as a reflection of the historical and cultural context. If they can confine the code to a nomadic patriarchal and feudal society, and later a villager agricultural society, then it should free us to reshape our own culture with only the shallowest glimpse at the underlying human problem addressed by the Law of Moses. In their eyes, the typical church compromise with American culture is not so bad, needing only a few adjustments here and there.
What the Old Covenant was meant to accomplish is more than a mere matter of contextual social stability. It also tells a story of what kind of depravity has taken humans due to the Watchers’ rebellion in Genesis 6. It’s far more than preserving the agrarian feudal society of ancient Israel. Many of us today are witnesses to the moral failures of Western Civilization.
Do you understand that the Devil and the Nephilim are bound under the Law of Christ, as well? That is, if someone obeys the moral principles of the Law, the Devil’s hold over them is weakened and eventually breaks down. The Nephilim spirits cannot come within the hedge of protection, or under the spiritual covering, of covenant people who obey the fundamentals behind the code of law.
Creation is inherently feudal in design. Mankind must have a feudal society. Since we lack the leverage of a national covenant, then the one place where we can institute Hebrew feudalism is in our churches. For all the problems with feudalism that you may imagine you see through your human reason, every other system is far worse. Families cannot build a covering or hedge against common human depravity with any other system.
When we congregate in the Spirit of Christ, we should be tribal. It’s not our shared ethnicity or DNA, but our spiritual identity. A church should be an extended family household. It should be organic, not a modern corporate structure. It’s private, not public. Yes, welcome visitors, but on the same terms that an extended family household would. When the body gets too large for one elder to manage, divide and continue; take a clue from how Abraham diverged away from Lot. Take a clue from how Jethro advised Moses to subdivide the tribes into smaller groups.
These are not culturally based solutions; they are fundamental to human nature. The same goes with shepherd patriarchy, strict marriage relationship controls, and social organization, along with avoiding ostentatious displays of wealth and power. By their own convictions, the wealthy should invest in the covenant body, not their own hedonistic comforts. All of these are echoed in the New Testament, starting with the teachings of Christ.
Probably the most difficult area of life would be when someone joins the covenant community with a divided household. Worse is when anybody in the community departs while still bound to someone in the community by external social custom or law. This is a challenge requiring a steadfast faith and sometimes creativity; there are no pat answers and few guidelines in the New Testament.
The Old Covenant rituals require study to understand the underlying situation. They teach us that coming before the Lord has never changed between the Fall and the Cross. The underlying model was the maintenance of sacred space, not a concern over personal guilt. It was all about loyalty and feudal submission. This is all foreign to western minds, which are pickled in individual culpability before the law. Our rituals of faith should rest on the Hebrew outlook, not the western.
The reason we seek to understand these things is so we can gain a clear vision of what has changed since the Cross. There is no longer a Temple somewhere on the earth to which we must report on a regular basis; in Christ we are His Temple. What would you expect from prophesies about the “abomination of desolation” when the temple defiled is your body?
Another question: How much of this do you see in typical churches? We haven’t done the work to breathe life into the covenant model for our day. The Covenant covering lies dormant for most believers.