Roots of Bitterness - 6 Discipline

Discipline. How do I relate to this word and the many confusing assumptions associated with it?

One reliable teacher that I value says that false, externalized discipline is really conditioning. It does not produce the skills for internal directing but teaches one to depend on outside authorities to determine their choices and results.

External law uses the slave/master model of relationship. Feeling like a slave tends to lead to addictions to mask the pain of bondage. That seems to fit how I felt growing up. But of course there was always a great deal of guilt associated with most things that presented opportunities for pleasure so the fear of the guilt often kept me from indulging in many of the pleasures. But this was all based on the fear-slave-punishment model of thinking.

In the grace model faith involves trust in a person who we know to be trustworthy from personal experience and relationship. In the Hebrew language the word for faith has implicit within it the idea of a person so worthy of trust that they cause you to trust in them. It is not something you generate but something evoked by the person trusted. But I have a very hard time coming up with examples in my own life of this kind of relationship. That explains why I have such a hard time with faith in God.

It seems that I spend most of my effort simply trying to dismantle the lies about God and about religion that my whole life has been built on and designed around. That feels like most of my financial life as well. I spend most of my life just attempting, usually unsuccessfully, to get back up to zero instead of really building real wealth into my life. My financial life and my spiritual life may have more in common than I thought.

My whole structure of thinking about life is so entrenched in the legal model that I feel I do not even have the mental equipment to comprehend grace, trusting, open, vulnerable relationships, unconditional love and mutuality. The very wiring of my brain seems to have only the circuits used for processing life through the principles of external rules, appeasement and human constructs about justice, fairness and equality.

Equality sometimes implies getting even until others have suffered as much pain as they caused – revenge. Equality implies that I get treated good if others are treated good. Equality sometimes even morphs into eventually thinking that everyone should have the same amount of money no matter whether they work hard for it or not.

Fairness is a lot along the same lines, but it can denote more that people should be treated according to what they have earned by their behavior. The harder one works to be good the more they should be rewarded with good things in their life.

Justice mostly has to do with getting even. Justice is always deeply immersed in externalism which is what the whole legal system epitomizes. That means that everyone is supposed to only get exactly what they deserve but must especially get all the punishment they deserve for all the problems and pain that they caused others. This whole way of thinking is based on artificial law, positive law, prescriptive law and feels absolutely true. It is the belief system of the whole world but was introduced, not by God but as an alternative way of living by Lucifer.

All of this background is the assumptions and context in which my perception of discipline have been developed. Discipline to me was seldom viewed as fair. Discipline and punishment were always assumed to be one and the same, as it is for many people. Discipline was the coercion used to force me to conform to the desires and decisions of those with more power or authority who wanted to impose their demands on me. I can never remember any real love associated with discipline, only anger, fear, force and manipulation. It was usually an attempt to break my spirit and force me to become weak, compliant and submissive without any nurture for my will. Discipline was a form of extortion to induce me, through fear of intense pain, to obey someone else's arbitrary rules. And of course all this was done using the name and appealing to the authority of God Himself invested in those perpetrating these practices on me.

That is my inner perception and memories whenever the word discipline is used. It is no wonder that when I read in Hebrews that God always disciplines the children that He loves that I immediately feel a sense of revulsion, resentment and conflict inside. For the things that I have been learning about God over the past few years all seem to be in direct conflict with the implications and feelings that I sense bound up in this word.

It is clear to me that I need a great deal of revision to the mental and emotional paradigms that I have on board for processing this passage. Or maybe I need a whole new apparatus for processing. Maybe my original equipment is unfixable. But I only have one physical brain and somehow God has to accomplish His work of transformation using the same brain that I have been using all of my life.

Beyond just coming up with a more accurate intellectual understanding of the word discipline, more importantly I have to have my memories and heart involved so that my reactions to circumstances and triggers will reflect the real meaning of discipline, whatever that is.

Law only defines. It has more to do with the results of sin but no way to really solve sin itself. In the strict legal model there is technically no forgiveness without shedding of blood. But God's ways are not based on the legal model but are primarily revelatory in nature.

This explains the contrast between what I have experienced growing up and the way God is trying to get me to see reality in recent years. In my training, forgiveness was always tied to my being sorry enough. However, in my mind the severity of the punishments that I received were the equalizing factor. After all, why should I feel sorry for some infraction of someone else's rules if I was just going to be whipped anyway. If it made no difference in the amount of pain that was going to be inflicted on me I saw no sense in submitting to the additional humiliation of “repenting” according to the common view of that word. I might just as well suffer the punishment even though I felt it was always far too harsh and then try to avoid getting caught again.

From this context it is becoming more clear to me why forgiveness too is a word that has a lot of confused feelings associated with it. Forgiveness has always been conditional in my upbringing. Forgiveness seemed to be a legal technicality by which someone who was offended could be persuaded or induced to forgo their right to “extract their pound of flesh”, to get even, to let their offender off the hook. If enough appeasement could be produced to placate the offended party then forgiveness could be received and some sort of uneasy peace could be restored to the relationship.

But since that was almost always never what happened in my training, the whole idea or usefulness of forgiveness seemed almost superfluous. Forgiveness was something demanded of me if someone who had offended me claimed that they were sorry. And saying we were sorry was sometimes a set of words that was forced from us as children under duress whenever we had hurt someone else and the adults decided it had to be straightened out. As I think about it now, the crazy and confused beliefs about all of these elements don't really make a lot of sense but I have seldom felt at liberty to even try to make sense out of them by admitting how I really felt about them. Just sitting here exploring my feelings about these things right now has been a real eye-opening experience for me.

James Wilder says that when you force a child to be generous at too early a stage of development before they have properly learned to receive with joy, that they often become stunted in their ability to give cheerfully. They may sometimes become very dutiful and even generous givers or hard workers in the church, but they cannot do it with spontaneity and gladness.

I think the same thing may apply to my situation in other areas. Because I was forced to say “I'm sorry” without any reference to or concern for the condition of my heart, I was in essence trained to be a good hypocrite, to repress my true feelings and to put performance far above internal reality or transformation at the heart level. Appearances were everything and feelings were to be forced, pretended or repressed. Being externally proper and right was made supreme and issues of the real heart and emotions were ignored and minimized. I early on lost the chance to develop the skills needed to bond with others properly with my heart. I also lost much of my ability to sympathize in many respects or to know what was proper to do when I did feel it.

Since I don't think hardly anyone understood the true nature of real forgiveness when I was growing up, I too came up with ideas about forgiveness that were just as distorted as everyone else's. Forgiveness usually meant something along the idea of suppressing my desire to get even and trying to forget the offense someone had done against me. It meant, in essence, excusing what they did and letting them off the hook in the arena of justice. It also seemed that I was expected to forgive others without conditions but that I had to earn forgiveness from others by enough groveling or appeasement to convince them that I was sincere in my “repentance”.

Repentance was another word that carried a lot of confused ideas. It meant trying really, really hard to repress my desires to do wrong things and try very hard with my will power to be a good person so that God would forgive me and allow me into heaven. It also meant trying to somehow divest myself of my natural desires toward sinning. Since it was generally acknowledged that our will power is not strong enough to do this then we were to spend whatever time and effort necessary to pray enough and read the Bible enough to induce God to give us more strength to reinforce our will and repress our evil tendencies. The Christian life was often described as an unending struggle, a battle and a march to overcome every evil tendency or desire and put forth super-human effort to be religious and become righteous enough to reach God's standards of perfection.

Whenever I failed in any area to do any of these things, then as a child of God under His strict administration I would very likely have bad things happen to me as a means of discipline to bring me back into line. These bad events would be potentially proportional in severity to the seriousness in God's eyes of the violations that I had committed or the mistakes I had made. God's punishment, of course, was supposed to be seen by me as an expression of His love for me as a means of preventing me from enjoying evil and thereby losing my soul, for if that were to happen He would have to torture me in the flames of hell on judgment day for not being good enough to please Him.

So in the context of all these assumptions about the meaning of religion, God's attitudes toward me and reality as I assumed it to be, discipline was primarily a means to coerce me under duress to stop feeling “wrong” desires for satisfaction and pleasure and to live a sterile, pure life devoid of very much pleasure but approved by all the authorities in my life. If my earthly family and church did not administer enough discipline to keep me in line then my heavenly Father would take up the slack and I never knew how angry He might get about something I thought was very small in my life. This has been the context for the word discipline as I now look back and see it.

Needless to say (but unfortunately the previous is still believed to be the right model by many) I developed increasing resentment in my heart about all of this that increasingly turned into rebellion and resistance against authority. The seeming unfairness of not only the whole world's and church's system of authority arrayed against me to force me to be good, but also heaven itself committed to my endless misery that was somehow supposed to be meant for my benefit, just seemed too much to endure. And to add insult to injury I was told that I must believe that all of this was done in love and that to resist it was to resist love itself which would result in even more dire consequences.

My expressions of the growing rebellion leaking from my heart in my earliteen years were met with even stronger punishments and assaults of Bible-thumping warnings that “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft!”. This demanded that I see myself as somehow associated with the occult if I felt strong feelings of resentment for all the abuse being carried out against me. In addition I felt I could not even allow myself to think of it as abuse or I would be in trouble for that as well because that would be disobeying the fifth commandment and I would then be in trouble with God.

I find it helpful to explore these feelings and memories and am surprised at the freedom that I now have to even do so. I also want to say very emphatically that I am not doing this as a means of throwing blame on anyone for the abuses and distortions that occurred in my past but as strictly a means of allowing God to shine His light into some of the dark recesses of my heart where there is still pain that has been sealed away for many decades. I have learned that until I can face my past misconceptions and embedded experiential beliefs in an atmosphere of safety and genuine love that they will continue to trigger false reactions to situations today that subconsciously remind me of those old feelings and threats against my heart.

As I am able to admit that what I was taught and what I learned through experience was really wrong, abusive and not true, especially about God, then I am taking the first steps toward real freedom. I am learning that the same God who was so misrepresented to me throughout most of my life is really a God radically different and infinitely better than I ever dared to imagine. As my heart slowly begins to accept that revelation, it also even more slowly begins to loosen its death-grip on the lies that it so firmly believes about reality and bit by bit God's true light is able to expose and replace those lie-based beliefs with true, unconditional love, healing compassion and seeds of truth that produce healthy, life-giving fruit instead of pain, bitterness and death.

I am glad that God is taking me through this process though many times I wish I were able to go through it faster than I do. It seems that whenever I plan and schedule specific times with trained people to facilitate this process that my heart tends to shut down and go into deeper hiding. But then later at times that are very inconvenient, in my thinking anyway, or even embarrassing, God will suddenly show up in my life and cause a moment of truth and revelation to flash into my heart in ways that offer resolution and intense emotions that I wish would occur within the more supported environments of the presence of people who could help me process it.

These events present a whole new dilemma for me. I feel that if I resist the revelation for fear of public shame in reaction to unexplainable emotional outbursts on my part for no apparent external reason, then God will not accomplish as much as He could if I would just ignore my circumstances and those around me and give Him free access to my heart immediately. I also have to deal with the feeling of guilt and fear that springs up based on the notion that if I resist the Spirit too much when it gives me these clear opportunities for healing that I will further harden my heart and I will just have to come back around to the same lesson again and learn it later in even more difficult circumstances. This is the typical feelings I have whenever this happens but it also smells suspiciously like these feelings too still have some lies about God operating in the background.

Anyway, this is what has come up as I look at this passage about discipline from God in Hebrews 12. I think it has been good to revisit these feelings and I hope God will use this to further His work in the healing of my heart and to bond me more intimately with His heart.

(next in series)

The Mind of a Hebrew

As I return to Hebrews today to continue my quest to uncover roots of bitterness, I began to think about who this book was written to and the possible reasons they may have had to entertain bitterness. Hebrews were Jews, the chosen nation, the people of God for many centuries to reveal to the rest of the world the truth about God. They finally rejected that position so completely that God had to accept their demand for divorce and revealed His backup plan – the body of Christ, His new bride. But this body was not distinct and separate from the Israelites but an outgrowth of them as is explained in Romans. The Jewish “branches” were broken off and Gentile branches were grafted in their place. But the trunk was not replaced and the opportunity is always there for the original branches to be grafted back in quite easily.

But if I was a Jew in those days listening to Paul's words about all of this and seeing thousands of non-Jews being welcomed into the favor of God that I thought was exclusively my prerogative, there would be a lot of potential for bitterness in my mind. And that was certainly demonstrated many times by the treatment by the Jews toward the Christians in those days. Most of the persecution suffered by Christians was instigated by jealous and bitter Jews trying to prevent God's plan to replace them as His chosen people on earth. They had for generations long believed that God's favor was only for Jews and just being born a Hebrew was enough to guarantee them a place ahead of everyone else in God's system.

Now, one of their most celebrated and zealous champions of that very belief had turned traitor on them and was now the zealous champion of their worst enemies, the Christians. And this very man, Paul, was going around teaching that Gentiles were considered in God's eyes as equally favored by Him when they accepted what seemed like a terribly watered down version of truth. Not only was Paul inviting millions of heathen and barbarians into fellowship with God that were disgusting to any good Jew, but he was also teaching that most of the strict requirements for being a chosen one were no longer valid. He was basically replacing all the good, religious doctrines that had been cultivated and worked out for centuries by the experts in religion with a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about love and faith and other emotional stuff that seemed to have no place in true piety. This sounded like heresy of the highest order and most Jews simply could not tolerate such perversion of what they strongly believed was “the truth”.

But remember, Paul is writing here presumably to converted Jews who are now part of the Christian believers. But that does not mean that they are free of all the previous baggage and beliefs about God from their past. It is also clear throughout the New Testament that there was a long-running undercurrent of discontent among the Jewish Christians about how Gentiles seemed to get off so easy compared to what the Jews believed was required to be a real Christian. They still could not believe in their heart that the gospel could really be that simple and easy to experience as the teachings of Paul seemed to imply. Because of this there was even within the church a lot of discontent and even bitterness in the hearts and minds of many Jewish Christians who felt that Paul was not strict enough in his teachings and beliefs.

The Jews were just like many, if not most people today in the religious world. They believed that one has to have a certain amount of tradition and rule-based behavior control to be a successful Christian. Sure you had to have help from God, but the responsibility for producing righteousness in the life to please a very austere, just God was the job of each person who expected to get to heaven. They believed that the gospel as Paul taught it was dangerously deficient in legal structure and requirements. They insisted that righteousness could only be accomplished through the imposition of strong regulations and ceremonies and discipline to keep people in line. They assumed that since God had taught them all of these “truths” for so many generations that it was simply absurd to throw them all away and embrace a completely new paradigm of thinking and relating to God. They promoted a more pragmatic approach to progress, a modification and improvement of the old ways but not such a radical break with the past. This was simply going too far and was sure to offend God and make Him angry with them. This would surely lead to the loss of many souls through dangerous deception and the disintegration of God's plans on earth.

It is at this point that the real problem begins to emerge. The fundamental misunderstanding in their thinking (and with ours) was their perception of what God is really like. They assumed from their view of the past that God was one who had to be placated and appeased or there would be dire consequences. God, they were certain, was very demanding of strict obedience to all the rules of law that had been compiled and revealed over history. Sure, maybe they had gone too far in their multiplication of rules and regulations and needed to revise and trim them down in certain areas, but fundamentally they still could not let go of their picture of God as a legal-based being who was more interested in obedience to law than He was in salvaging and restoring the hearts of His lost children. That was too much emotional based kind of thinking, had no real power to control people with fear and therefore had little place in “true religion”.

I believe this is likely a reasonable description of the general mindset of the average Jewish Christian in Paul's day. I'm sure there was a lot more involved, but basically human nature has not changed much over the centuries and the same problems tend to be repeated over and over again. The pervasive thinking in legal-oriented people today is pretty close to reflecting the same kind of thinking that has plagued people in all ages.

Given this context and placing myself in this mindset while reading Hebrews 12 it is easier to see why the writer is saying the things I find here. A Jew, or any legalistically-minded individual, would need to hear the various warnings and advice and instructions put down in this passage.

• There needs to be a better understanding of what faith really is and to experience more of it in our own life.

• There needs to be an understanding of our true relationship with those people who lived in Old Testament times.

• We need to understand the true nature and identity of beliefs that are really preventing us from entering fully into the freedom and peace that God wants for us as Christians.

• There needs to be a great deal more focus on Jesus and the intimate role He has in the true Christian's life.

• We need to understand the truth about Jesus' example and how to apply that to our own life.

• We need to see what sin really is outside the legal model and then how we are to resist it.

• We need to understand our relationship to God as children instead of slaves and what that means for interpreting the circumstances that come into our lives within that context.

• We must realize that the way our earthly fathers treated us is often not the right paradigm for understanding how God disciplines us.

• We must realize what God's real goal is for us – sharing in His holiness at the heart level, not external-oriented perfectionism. (We also need to know what these words really mean)

• We need to realize that much of our depression and discouragement comes from our misconceptions about God and His disposition toward us.

• We need to understand that our legalism has a wilting, discouraging effect on others in the body of Christ and that instead we need to be strengthening others, not making them weaker by our condemnation.

• We need to realize that instead of pursuing our righteousness and external perfectionism that God's desire for us is to pursue peace and sanctification (another seriously misinterpreted word), but in the ways He has outlined for us in the true gospel, not in the old ways of the letter of the law.

• All of these things are potential roots that if not corrected in our minds and hearts become sources of bitterness that cause endless trouble and defile the spirit of many around us.

Once again this passage is trying to get across to us the radical nature of the difference between the true gospel of God and the religious ideas that have been cultivated by humans throughout all of history. The fountain of the heart must be purified before the streams can become pure. He who is trying to reach heaven by his own works in keeping the law is attempting an impossibility. There is no safety for one who has merely a legal religion, a form of godliness. The Christian's life is not a modification or improvement of the old, but a transformation of nature. There is a death to self and sin, and a new life altogether. This change can be brought about only by the effectual working of the Holy Spirit. {DA 172}

(next in series)

What Really is Babylon?

And I saw another angel flying in midheaven, having an eternal gospel to preach to those who live on the earth, and to every nation and tribe and tongue and people; and he said with a loud voice, "Fear God, and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come; worship Him who made the heaven and the earth and sea and springs of waters." And another angel, a second one, followed, saying, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who has made all the nations drink of the wine of the passion of her immorality." (Revelation 14:6-8)

The conviction is beginning to emerge that the call to come out of Babylon has far greater meaning and implications than most have ever imagined. As I have been paying close attention and taking notes and trying to assimilate the deeper concepts in some presentations by a researcher of ancient civilization, I am starting to realize that Babylon involves far more than simply worshiping on the wrong day of the week or subscribing to wrong doctrines as I have been taught all my life. I now see that this can potentially be terribly self-serving interpretations of prophecy that completely miss the much greater warning in all the passages related to Babylon.

As I say, I am only just beginning to perceive the enormity of what this means so there is far more that I don't see than what I do at this point. But as my mind applies what I have been learning to real life situations, I suddenly see its practical application quite literally everywhere. The phrase, “Babylon is a system of thinking” is far more powerful and deeper than just having a wrong set of doctrines. It is the whole basis on which we found our thinking, our logic and all of our relationships. It is the Bible's code word for the antithesis of the Kingdom of Heaven as displayed in the life and teachings of Jesus. It is the very sum and substance of what we hail as civilization and progress in our world and society.

Babylon in God's eyes represents the whole system of living that we take for granted based on the three foundations of Economics, Law and Kingship that all emerged from the earliest cultures in Mesopotamia. This apparatus now completely encompasses every aspect and detail of life on this planet and completely skews our perception of reality. We really do not have a correct concept of the real meaning of the warnings that we sometimes quote about the difference between being a real Christian and our old way of living. But God's ways really are not a modification or improvement of the old ways but a radically, revolutionary, completely separate way of thinking and living. We usually apply this primarily in the “spiritual” realm of religion but fail to see its far more pervasive applications to every aspect of our perceptions of reality. In reality there is no separation between religion and secular – our life is our life and our spirit is involved in every aspect of our life. The distinctions between secular and religious are all part of the Babylonian way of discriminating.

Our idea of religion has become so infected with the basic principles of Babylon that it is like a wheat field full of weeds mingled all throughout completely entangled at the root level. It is impossible to pick through and pull up the weeds of Babylonian thought without damaging the good wheat and that job must be left to the angels. But Jesus gave a stronger metaphor when He said that you simply can't patch an old garment with new material or put new wine into old wineskins. He stated emphatically that new wine must only go into new wineskins.

We are fast coming to that point in history. The system of Babylon has hopelessly infected all religion beyond restoration or reformation. Reforms have been attempted by many throughout history with varied degrees of success and I do not discount them. But the final solution I believe will be different in important aspects, some of which still remain hidden from us. In the final events of earth there will be a polarization and a complete separation as those who cling to the roots of fear will be drawn inexorably deeper into the deceptions of Babylon while those who follow their heart attracted by the beauty of the real truth about God and His ways will find themselves expelled forcibly from the structures of civilization in this world.

The results will be shocking at the very least. It will become more obvious that the makeup of those who are truly following the Spirit and are drawn out of Babylon are often many who are least suspected to be spiritual by those who consider themselves most religious. At the same time, the majority of those who themselves have championed their assumed knowledge of truth and may have even spent their life energetically promoting the message to come out of Babylon, but who failed to perceive that the spirit with which they worked was actually in harmony with Babylon, will be baffled and confused by a sudden turn of events. Sadly, many of them will be found protesting to Jesus, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?' Then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.' (Matthew 7:22-23 NRSV)

It is not just important but it is a life and death crisis if we do not understand at the heart level as well as the head what the real meaning of Babylon is. What I am starting to realize is that everything that grew out of literal Babylon and that now makes up all of civilization as we know it is suspect at best and defilingly deceptive on average. That means that the whole legal model of thinking and relating to one another is Babylonian thinking. That means that the whole system of economics and all the artificial value and exchange system that permeates every aspect of our lives is Babylonian living. That means that all relationships that have any element of comparison or value based on anything other than equality and unity, honor and humility in the body of Christ is Babylonian relationships. Babylon is all about power and control – that is the obsessive center of focus for those who live in Babylon.

After these things I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was illumined with his glory. And he cried out with a mighty voice, saying, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place of demons and a prison of every unclean spirit, and a prison of every unclean and hateful bird. "For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the passion of her immorality, and the kings of the earth have committed acts of immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich by the wealth of her sensuality." (Revelation 18:1-3)

Babylonian living means viewing anyone else better or worse than yourself. Babylonian living means feeling low self-worth and not believing the inestimable value that God has for every individual. Babylonian living means feeling better or worse than others in any way. Babylonian life is the whole structure of human designed authority, all the power structures in politics, commerce and religion.

Babylonian living is believing that things and people can be artificially valued and compared and subsequently inflated or deflated according to the whims of society. The whole idea of economics, money, real estate, ownership, capitalism, greed, selfishness etc. is all Babylonian through and through. That is why it is revealed in Revelation that those who come out of Babylon in the end will not be able to buy or sell unless they receive the mark of the beast. Because the beast is the power of Babylon and if you don't want to participate with the spirit of the beast you are not welcome to participate in the activities within that system. Instead of being afraid of not being able to buy or sell we should be rejoicing that we will finally be outside the oppressive, deceptive system of life that has held us in fear and bondage for all of our days. It will actually be another step toward final liberation for us, not a restriction.

Babylonian thinking also involves all the system of law and legal thinking that has been the most pervasive element of Babylon to permeate religion in my opinion. The reason we struggle so much with legalism and all its terrible effects on our spiritual lives is because we have been deceived by the enemy of truth to think that God operates His Kingdom under the rule of law just like we do on earth. This is possibly one of the most subtle deceptions that is most difficult to address and it raises the most violent and fierce antagonism from those who benefit most from its structures.

The whole Babylonian system of law is artificial in nature and is a counterfeit of the reality seen in God's true kingdom. It is based on arbitrary rules designed to fix any problems in the system of economics and reinforce the structures of discrimination among people. To work properly, it has to have added incentives in the way of arbitrary punishments. But that is not enough to make it really effective and so a massive organization of enforcers has to be put into place to impose the artificial punishments on anyone neglecting or refusing to live within this whole artificial system of life.

God's last call as seen in the mighty angels of Revelation is to come out of Babylon. If we allow our minds to really take hold of the implications of this call and begin to understand the bigger view of what is meant by Babylon we will either shudder with horror and then immediately go into denial or we will see a glimmer of the freedom that God is inviting us into by joining His family and becoming real children of the Most High.

Babylon is the whole structure of thinking and living as we know it on this earth. It is based on fear, force and deception and most of all control. It is massive, pervasive and unavoidable. To choose to leave Babylon is to risk losing everything we are familiar with and depend on for survival. It is far more radical than almost anyone dares to talk about publicly because it challenges all of our assumptions. But we are quickly moving toward a point in history where we will all be forced to decide between depending on Babylon and those around us for life or whether we will place all our bets on the Creator God who invites us into a completely different system of living totally separated from Babylonian thinking in every aspect.

To live in Babylon is to live in the external world and base our view of reality on the externals.

To live in God's family is to live from the heart and be led by the Spirit of God.

To relate to others in Babylon is to measure and compare ourselves with each other and treat people according to their position or esteemed value based on performance or roles.

To relate to others is God's system is to realize that every person is infinitely valuable in God's family and that all are created equally important. It is to treat others without any distinctions or discrimination of any type knowing that we are all brothers and sisters, co-partners in the grace of Jesus Christ.

To succeed in Babylon a person measures life and values things according to the benefit they can personally derive from them. They seek to manipulate the system and others though economic leveraging to improve their personal sense of worth and their relative position of wealth as determined by the artificial measurements of money.

To participate in the kingdom of God one must die to self and to the Babylonian way of living and be born again into a radically different way of thinking and relating to other beings. They depend on God alone to provide for their needs based on His promises to do so, trusting Him as a kind, caring Father to protect and provide for His cherished children. They live in a spirit of selfless service filled with the kindness and compassion and love that they receive from their own loving Parent in heaven.

Flee from the midst of Babylon, And each of you save his life! Do not be destroyed in her punishment, For this is the LORD'S time of vengeance; He is going to render recompense to her. Babylon has been a golden cup in the hand of the LORD, Intoxicating all the earth. The nations have drunk of her wine; Therefore the nations are going mad. Suddenly Babylon has fallen and been broken; Wail over her! Bring balm for her pain; Perhaps she may be healed. We applied healing to Babylon, but she was not healed; Forsake her and let us each go to his own country, For her judgment has reached to heaven And towers up to the very skies. The LORD has brought about our vindication; Come and let us recount in Zion The work of the LORD our God! (Jeremiah 51:6-10)

Shedding Blood in Resistance

You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin. (Hebrews 12:4)

I have been pondering this verse for days and suspect I may be off and on for a very long time. I am listening to any insights that the Spirit has to bring to me at any time and I sense that there is much more in here than meets the eye as is often the case in texts that on the surface seem very disturbing or conflicting.

As I grapple with this verse and the surrounding context I see many different ways in which to view it, some rather legalistic and others somewhat tentative. This may be one of those places that is so unclear it leaves God a lot of room to maneuver and convey a number of different messages depending on my needs at the time. If I am not too dogmatic and insist there is only one right interpretation I suspect I may be able to see more light through this keyhole.

I am presently working on a contrast chart of this whole passage and came to this verse this morning. One thing that I see here is that I have not been required to be the point man against sin and shed my own blood in resistance. Jesus has taken that role and there only needs to be one. But if I ever do find myself being threatened to that extent I will have been empowered inside with the peace and the compassion of Jesus for those who threaten me because He lives in me. It is His Spirit of love – free of resentment – for His enemies that enables anyone to endure that level of hostility.

Other texts come to my mind as I look at this and I wonder how they interrelate with it. In Matt. 5:39 Jesus says, But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. I find the contrast of these two verses interesting because one says to not resist and the other talks about resisting, though I am not convinced it is telling us to do so or not. It simply states that we have not done it yet. Anything beyond that seems to be an assumption which can often get us into trouble understanding Scripture. They may very well be talking about resisting two very different things also. Resisting sin can be very different than resisting the evil brought against us by sinners. Our underlying assumptions about what sin really is also greatly affects our ideas of what it means to resist it.

This verse is bounded on two sides by other verses that I believe contribute heavily to finding its true meaning. The two before it emphasize our need to keep focused on Jesus who has endured more antagonism from sin than anyone else ever will, and the next verse which launches into a section about viewing life through the perspective of a child of God accepting discipline. I have to believe that there is a very significant reason this verse is sandwiched between these other thoughts but it is not all real clear to me yet. So I keep looking.

One thing that comes to mind is the comparison of Jesus as the Son of God and viewing myself as also a son of God. On the other hand, what Jesus did may not be required of me to do. I may not necessarily need to shed my blood because my role in the Great War is not to try to save all of humanity like Jesus did. Then again, Jesus wants to live His life in and through me in such a way as to attract others to the love of God and the real truth about Him in similar ways to what He did in person while here on earth. And if that at some point involves persecution against me by those who are intolerant and resistant to the love and compassion of God toward them, then my resistance will be because I am compelled from a heart full of the presence of the One who is the source and supplier of all love, not because I have achieved some level of perfection.

I am currently have a major paradigm shift in my thinking and understanding of the real reason Jesus suffered and died for humanity. It is an intense change of perspective that I am not completely familiar with yet but it is becoming more clear each day. This new view of the cross and the real strategy of God in the Great Controversy is much more consistent with many other things I have been learning about God and the bigger issues of the Controversy than all of the other explanations put forth by theologians and religionists that I have ever heard. But to simplify it into a few words without peripheral understandings in place makes it appear to be heresy of the highest order to some. But I am feeling more and more convicted that it is closer to the real truth than much of what I have been taught all of my life and I am continuing to study and pray and analyze it trying to grasp as many implications and insights as I can.

I am very resistant to allowing one or two people or a given organization to being an authoritative source for what I believe. I have certainly been blessed by many different ministries that have contributed to much of my transformation in thinking over the past 15 years, but I do not depend on any of them as the last word on anything. I have gained very important insights from their teachings and compared them to what has proven true and reliable from my own study and what the Spirit has been leading me to see. At the same time I try to remain willing to keep open even my own settled conclusions, for I believe that real truth never fears examination and reexamination, it only becomes better for it. And sometimes what I have believed was settled truth is found to be in need of updating when the Spirit convicts me that it is time to move to a higher view of reality.

But truth is always consistent with itself and will always reinforce the goodness of God. If anything brings into question the foundational belief in God's goodness, compassion and consistent love, then I have to view that idea with suspicion myself. It may contain some truth that I need to be aware of but quite likely it also contains some perversion that is designed to detract from the real glory of God.

So when I look at this verse about shedding of blood in resistance and striving against sin, my mind is very cautious to not jump into any ideas that sympathize with any self-focused efforts of spirituality. Coming from a background saturated with religion focused on perfectionism I am always extremely wary of anything that would attempt to lead me back in that direction. At the same time I have to be careful to not overreact from that to another extreme and lose sight of important truths that God wants to impress on me. I want God Himself to be the real and final authority for the revelation of truth above all other claimants.

Another thing I notice now is that this whole section comes just after a long listing of people and their experiences of faith demonstrated in their lives from chapter 11. This verse is very likely a reference back to some of those who really did shed their blood in striving against sin. Paul is likely saying that most of us reading this have not really experienced the depth of faith available to us as those in the past who were so devoted to staying connected to God's heart that they preferred torture and death than to betray the only Source of real life for them. They came to a point in their lives where they knew God so well that their trust in Him and His character surpassed anything men could do to distract them from that attachment.

These people are our examples of what it looks like to focus the eyes on Jesus, to consider Him who also endured the hostility of sinners against Him even though they were not personally able to have the example of Jesus because they lived before He came to earth as a man. Even with that disadvantage they responded to God's attractiveness to the point of loyalty to Him above anything else. In light of that, this verse becomes an invitation to follow their example of devotion and enter into a much deeper intimacy with God that will enable us to live from an enriched heart fully devoted to the ultimate Source of love Himself.

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