Victor Mandrake brought up a criticism on Twitter on my recent post on recourse in marriage. It seems like his Twitter is private, so what of
I answered the immediate question on Twitter:
@ContrapunctusV Possibly. If the husband thinks he was ill-treated he can take it to court, then the family can prove the wife's claims.
— Free Northerner (@FreeNortherner) December 18, 2014
But I want to make a larger point here.
Of course there’s a potential someone will lie and I’m sure there will be people who get hurt in any system or scheme proposed here on the blog, but pointing out that a system could not stop every possible corruption is not a good criticism. Every system will have a failure point and every system will have corruption. Humans are fallen creatures tempted to all varieties of sins and any and every political, economic, and legal system will be prone tovarying degrees and forms of corruption.
Utopia does not exist because people are people and prone to corruption. Attempts at utopia always lead to unimaginable heights of brutality because there is no way to create a perfect system for imperfect beings, and trying to force them into the system will destroy them and the system. I am not attempting to create a perfect system. No reactionary is trying to create a perfect system that is free from corruption.
One of the most basic foundations of reactionary thought is: humans are corrupt and any system with humans in it will be corrupted. Utopia is impossible. Everything is broken.
What I am trying to do is outline workable systems built for humans that will limit the excesses of natural human corruption. Systems that are stable and will provide people with a sense of place and try to lure out their better natures. Our modern system is cold, inhuman, and bureaucratic. We do not need a perfect system, we need a human system.
Have you read the Institutes of Biblical Law, by John Rushdoony? He shows that the rules in the Bible come closer than any other possible system to doing what you want. I hope you’ll post a review of the Institutes here some day. Thanks to the Constitution of Moses, little Armenia kept its independance for over a thousand years. The Constitution of Moses isn’t just for Jews.
The only utopia the Earth will ever see will be the promised 1,000 year reign of Yeshua on the throne of Israel shortly before the end of temporal existence and the beginning of eternal existence.
Short of that we’re in a holding pattern to practice spiritual disciplines (watch what we think, feel and say) and ensure no man or woman is ignorant of the fact that there is a day of judgment and those not found in the Books of Life will have to hope that their own deeds are enough to justify them (a gamble I know I would rather not take).
John Donner, why pull punches? Matthew 5:18. Jesus said that the Law of Moses will not pass away until heaven and earth do. Unlike our own wisdom and righteousness, the wisdom and righteousness of the Law come from God. There is a concrete code of behavior, and it is found in the first five books of the Bible. When two or more gather together and covenant before the Almighty to obey Him and follow His paths, none shall stand before them.
Why fear to speak plainly? Your future, and that of your children, and their children, is at stake. 1Peter3:14
Leviticus 26:7 And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. 8 And five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight: and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword.
Deuteronomy 31:6 Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for YHWH thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.
Since God is good, why would he go back on any good promises He made?
Psalms 27:1 YHWH is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? YHWH is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
God gave us instructions. All the evil that has befallen us, is because our people, our ancestors, rejected the covenant, and saw little value in it. Every evil thing we experience today, was described in full. You can avoid the Law because of all the Church teachings in the world; but the Curses are real and aren’t ending. What have you to lose? Blessings are promised for obedience; the opposite of every curse. Why reject blessings from YHWH? So you can “fit in” at some false church ruled by a mob of dirty bird preachers and filthy pulpit parrots?
I don’t understand how I have pulled punches?
The only thing I’m understanding is that you are under the delusion that the 2nd Earth can be saved when the Bible is clear that YHWH never intended for that (why else would we enter into a “NEW” Heaven and a “NEW” Earth)?
There’s no saving societies and the kingdoms of man. There is living in the Kingdom of Heaven now – a spiritual kingdom that was preached by Yohanan and Yeshua – which requires repentance (metanoeo: to change one’s thinking). Perhaps you should give some changed thinking toward the idea that anything short of a perfect man – and Yeshua had perfect DNA – could perfectly uphold the Law in all respects.
No, the law of Moses will not pass away until the second heaven and second earth pass away, but we were never made righteous through the law because we could never uphold it. I get the sense that you are of one bent of Judaism or another. Abraham was not made righteous by works nor by the law for it hadn’t been passed to Moses yet. He was made righteous by his faith.
You are certainly right that the church has poisonous teachings but you obviously have no idea who I am or what I believe because I do not agree with church doctrine nor do I consider myself a “Christian.” Sooooooooooooooo…
Moreover, please explain to me how we can even practice the Law without a temple with which the ritual sacrifices required for blood atonement and every other kind of atonement and covering/”forgiveness” for sin?
John Donner, I looked at your blog, so I have some idea where you are at right now. All your questions have very good answers. I lack time to answer you in full tonight, and also fear the answers would overwhelm this blog. Respectfully, both to you and to me, I recommend you read the following: Volume 1, Institutes of Biblical Law, by John Rushdoony. There is an ebook available.
Also, on the topic of blood atonement, etc, this radio show by George Gordon introduces the topic fairly well:
http://georgegordon.org/audio/radio/search.lsp?r=95&q=circumcision
Also a brief glance at these two websites:
http://biblelaw101.com/
http://loveandtruth.net/
I’ll check back here after I rest. Today is the Biblical New Moon, a holy festival integral to and as important as the Sabbath. Happy New Moon. May He bless your researches and answer your prayers on this day.
John Donner, I will address one thing right now. You seem to make the Kingdom of Heaven entirely spiritual. If it is all in your head, then it is of no effect. If your heart and mind are changed, then your behavior must of necessity also change. And it is by your behavior that God and men will know what is in your heart. A word not acted on, is of no effect. The Word even says, “According to what is in a man’s heart, so he speaketh”. It is by your actions that you Love God, because Love is an action, not a feeling.
He who you obey, is your King. If you obey God, then you are truly in the Kingdom of God, since he has become your King, and is governing you by his Word. It is very simple. If you are obeying God, you are in his Kingdom. If you aren’t obeying God, then it doesn’t matter how many spiritual exercises and meditations and feelings you have; you aren’t in His Kingdom. If you aren’t obeying Him, then He isn’t ruling over you. This is concrete, not hypothetical. The blessings and rewards in this life are also concrete, not nebulous and hand-wavy like you hear from the pulpit.
Perform the actions, and the feelings will follow. Focus on the feelings, and you will never get around to doing the actions. Remember the experiment where Charles Darwin started praying to a statue of a monkey. After a couple weeks he actually started to develope feelings of reverence and fondness for the monkey. If an intelligent man could feel this way for a mere idol of his own devising, how much more will your feelings of love for the Almighty grow each day as you spend your time serving and obeying?
Free, for what you laid out in your traditional recourse post to work in the manner you intend, the church would have to be lead by masculine men who understand and support Bibical Patriarchy.
Reckon that has not been the case for some hundreds of years. Having experienced how the church and Christain leadership acts towards men with misbehaving wives I would not subject myself to them again.
What I see in post like that is theory vs practice. I understand both. The two are not even remotely connected.
Mycroft – I have no particular disagreement with anything you have said in your last post. I just don’t understand why you seem to be teaching that the Law is some kind of path to salvation – it isn’t. That’s not to say that the Law isn’t good (it certainly is!) and that we shouldn’t try to follow it (we certainly should!) but when you responded to my comment that there will be no earthly utopia until the prophesied physical manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth during the millineal reign, I had to question why you would think this would ever work. Just as you can quote Matthew 5:18, one could just as easily point to Matthew 22:35-40. But when it comes to justifying one’s own doctrine using the scriptures, there really is no end to it – that’s why there’s more denominations than there are translations.
Israel was a nation that lived according to the Law as best as any nation could be expected; they received it in its original language, kept it sacred, made it prominent, wore it around their foreheads and arms… and yet for all their reverence for the Law it still didn’t build them a utopia. (I would hardly call the modern Israel a utopia either – blessed, certainly, but also its very existence threatened every day such to the point that military service for EVERY person is mandatory for a season.)
Anyway, there is more that could be said though I don’t know that it needs to – and I agree with your sentiment that we should be respectful to Free Northerner and not clog up his comment space with our tangent – so you can always continue this line of discussion with me in private.
FN, your evenhanded and well written post has attracted some colorful characters. It’s probably just a matter of time now before you get requests for your comment section to accommodate the Hebrew alphabet so they can properly infuse their posts with the Kabbalistic magicks of the 10 HIDDEN NAMES OF GOD.
OK, that’s not very charitable of me, but this is a well-known type: the very sincere but unbalanced (and somewhat troubled) believer who spends lots of time castigating other faithful for the shallowness of their theology, when not engaged in solitary brooding over who had more hitpoints, St Augustine or St John Chrysostom. Critiquing the limpness of modern Churchianity is one thing, but retreating into a shell of “everyone else is doing it wrong! Read my obscure blog for 10 ESOTERIC SECRETS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!” is for cranks who think they are living in a Dune novel, and who would be better off spending some time volunteering at a food bank or even just taking a walk in the sunshine, and less time treating the Pentateuch like a D&D sourcebook.
Anyway, I like the OP because it reflects one of the insights that first opened my eyes to the wisdom of Christianity, which is just the plain readily-observable reality of man’s fallen nature. Christians get mocked as naive wishful thinkers, but they actually have a much shrewder and more jaded view of human nature than atheist progressives, who really seem to believe that the basic problems of morality have been solved and as soon as we finish normalizing sodomy and abortion and transvestism and all the rest we’ll have a new golden age of tolerance and harmony. That said, I have a low opinion of evangelical types who promote this or that degenerate politician because they are “a good Christian”. There’s nothing wrong with preferring leaders who are Christians, but treating that as a reason to trust them implicitly is actually just the opposite of what Christianity demands. It’s the mirror image of how progs thought Obama would be a transformative savior figure, only to be disappointed by his all-too-human (and frankly obvious from the start) shortcomings.
Please explain to me where I ever encouraged anyone to read my blog for the sake of discovering ten esoteric names of God or moreover tried to imply that my way is the only way in an era where the living Spirit of God is active and desiring a unique relationship with each and every one of us.
Because you are, indeed, being quite uncharitable as none of those things are true.
I wish people would stop holding people to a perfect standard all the time. That’s gotta end.
It’s because people only care about themselves. They only care about what the other person can do for them.
Amen, “just a girl.” I apologize if I gave off the impression I was trying to hold people to a higher standard.
We should be encouraging each other to reach higher standards; but not condemning people for falling short. Encompassed within encouragement would be learning from other people (a lot of my most powerful lessons in the scripture were taught to people I thought I was going to minister to – like walking up to a homeless person thinking “I can minister the Word to them!” and then they end up giving me a lesson!). As Free Northerner’s subtitle states: Iron sharpens iron.
If certain people are comfortable where they are at, it isn’t our job to condemn or try to convict them to go higher – everyone’s relationship with the Holy Spiirt / Ruach Qodesh is unique and we should respect that person and their relationship and their level of intimacy and their comfort level.
We should also seek to find as much agreement as possible – something I did not start off this thread correctly doing and for which I want to repent and publicly apologize for. I am a firm believer in Ephesians 4; there is one “LORD” (YHWH / Yeshua), one baptism, one faith, etc… John 17 calls for unity and oneness… If it offends someone that I don’t want to adopt the moniker of “Christian” for myself then I apologize but I would remind them that none of the authors of the New Testament thought of themselves as Christians either – to include Yeshua. (They all thought of themselves as either Jews, some kind of new sect of Judaism, or more simply – and what I prefer to think of myself as – disciples of Yeshua and followers of the Way.)
I don’t so much get into the flesh when people do not respect me but I can be drawn into the flesh when people show a lack of respect for the Names of our creator. If they do it in ignorance that’s one thing (and not likely to get me in the flesh) but when they do it and they clearly know something about it (citing Kabbalah, etc) then they are no longer in the “ignorant” category and are choosing to willfully disrespect the name, so that can get me in the flesh. I had to physically leave my apartment/internet connection, fast, pray, and search the scriptures to realize the error of what I was doing and how to not be in the flesh about it.